Raptor Talos II POWER9 Benchmarks Against AMD Threadripper & Intel Core i9

[Yoshi]

Really impressive results. Hopefully RaptorCS continues to be successful.

[Michael]

How long will you keep the system? Would love to see more and more tests.

Presumably for as long as the hardware remains relevant and still being used for benchmarking, there isn't any set date.

[hax0r]

Does Talos II support off the shelf AMD/Nvidia graphics cards or the card needs special BIOS/firmware that contains POWER compatbile binary? My SPARC64 VII for instance needs special Radeon card that has BIOS compiled for SPARC arch.

[madscientist159]

Does Talos II support off the shelf AMD/Nvidia graphics cards or the card needs special BIOS/firmware that contains POWER compatbile binary? My SPARC64 VII for instance needs special Radeon card that has BIOS compiled for SPARC arch.

If there are open drivers for the card, it just works for the most part. For using the GPU in petitboot (before the target operating system has loaded) the only obstacle is proprietary GPU firmware, which we do not ship as part of the base Talos II firmware image (unless a specific GPU was ordered as part of a built system).

We've been working on ways to simplify providing the proprietary GPU firmware to the bootloader, see for instance https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Talos..._To_BOOTKERNFW, but there's still some work to go (including making this as simple as point + click). Long term it would be great if AMD would provide open firmware for their GPUs and compute cards, so that either it could be flashed to the GPU itself or shipped as part of the base firmware image, but AMD has publicly stated they cannot do so at this time.

If you don't want to mess around with GPU firmware and the bootloader, you don't need to -- just use the onboard VGA or serial to interact with the bootloader and allow the OS to load the proprietary firmware for your GPU.

[Maddo]

Ehm, unless I missed something, aren't these result kinda bogus since we're comparing a dual socket setup against a single socket one?

[rene]

"The Talos II power consumption during this task was about a 400 Watt average." That's more then my ageing dual-core Apple "IBM 970MP" G5, … where can I sight up? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU1RK4TR-GA ;-)

[cen1]

This is very interesting. I'd consider to get a lower end box for around 2000 $$ for some cross platform compiling. I didn't imagine POWER is so competitive with x86

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Retail cost for your config is what? $7500-$8500?

[nuetzel]

@Michael
Nice system (!) and GREAT test.
But maybe pull one CPU or disable it and bench then.
The more natural dual comparisons are underway, you mentioned.

[dungeon]

Retail cost for your config is what? $7500-$8500?

That is not much - dual socket workstation average

https://www.titancomputers.com/Best-...uters-s/72.htm

OK 4/5000 is an average These in data centers probably do only Dual Sockets and Quad AMD Instinct/s... of course all that comes with an Instinctive prices