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

[freespirit]

freespirit first I thought you were right but after thinking about it again, it seems not that easy. With the Talos Workstation developers are able to get access to POWER9 systems for a decent price. Now they are able to patch/port the missing stuff to POWER9. And AFAIR RaptorCS offers (free?) access to their VPS for developers of "important" apps. I think madscientist159 wrote about that in another topic.

You are right but i think will be not enough, i understand raptorcs have limited resources, they should push ibm to do that or at least try to do something more. The competition is high and usually the winner is a mix of low cost and funtionality, in this kind of market, at least for open source entusiast the price could be a bit higher, but no one can handle with funtionality issue, o can spend a bit more but i cannot leave programs i need, at least the more famous like firefox, libre office, virt manager, vlc etc

[starshipeleven]

"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 ;-)

It's a dual CPU board running 2 CPUs.

[Yoshi]

freespirit first I thought you were right but after thinking about it again, it seems not that easy. With the Talos Workstation developers are able to get access to POWER9 systems for a decent price. Now they are able to patch/port the missing stuff to POWER9. And AFAIR RaptorCS offers (free?) access to their VPS for developers of "important" apps. I think madscientist159 wrote about that in another topic.

[freespirit]

As i wrote in another topic, there is almost no info on applications, so people who care about open source and use it as workstation is confused about it. Popular application test is needed, i suggest to use debian because is on of more popular distro, and other popular distro is based on it.
I think ibm and raptorcs should try to work with popular app devs to make it compatibe much as possible, or with major distro, because people is scared about spend a ton of money without know if their needed program work correctly, and not everyone know how to compile programs or patch it.
In my opinion more info on application is needed and before blackbird will be released ibm and raptor should invest money to work on popular app fixes to work out of the box in linux distro.
It feels frustrating to spend tousand dollars for a machine who cannot run apps will a 500 x86 will do.
I hope they will learn from windows mobile failure, no apps no party, i think in the post Snowden era the market of open source hardware could just grow and people are interested on it, but programs must work out of the box

[classichasclass]

I bet it comes with horrid noisy enterprise fans though. Wonder if it's possible to jury-rig a closed loop cooler onto it with some modified brackets. We gotta get Stephen Burke one of these!

165W is still a lot at idle. I assume you're only running the usual suspects (browser and a couple terminals?)

When it first arrived, the fans were quite noisy, almost intolerable. This was quickly corrected. Recent firmwares aren't any louder than any of my other systems, and visitors to the house don't notice it's on. The fans really only roar on startup.

Right now I have Firefox open with 51 tabs, four terminals, VLC playing music and a text editor. When I'm building Firefox it goes up to about 180W. The highest I've recorded from it is 212W on IPL, which throttles down shortly after bootup (compare to the quad G5 sitting next to it, which pulls around 230W at idle on reduced power).

Cameron Kaiser

[MaxToTheMax]

If you're running a data center, and the only thing you care about is performance/watt, then POWER9 actually looks quite good. As a workstation? Well, I am one of very few people who might be willing to shell out 3x as much for slightly worse performance, because I really care a lot about open source-- but it's certainly kind of a niche.

I bet it comes with horrid noisy enterprise fans though. Wonder if it's possible to jury-rig a closed loop cooler onto it with some modified brackets. We gotta get Stephen Burke one of these!

Let me give you another data point. This 8-core (two 4-core SMT-4 Sforza) system with 1.5TB in NVMe storage, 32GB RAM, BD-ROM and WX7100 workstation card is running about 165W as I type this. I think that would be a more typical workstation loadout than what Michael is testing here.

Cameron Kaiser

165W is still a lot at idle. I assume you're only running the usual suspects (browser and a couple terminals?)

[classichasclass]

https://www.talospace.com/2018/09/mo...irefox-62.html

Can't use Jemalloc. Can't do Release build.Can't use Clang. Can't use Gold.

And still no Chromium on POWER. And no stories of successful unpatched source builds working for ffmpeg, VLC, MPV, LibreOffice, FileZilla, Wireshark, tac_plus, OpenLDAP, GIMP and all of their respective dependencies.

And all the out-of-tree drivers for Realtek's 802.11ac USB adapters only support building for ARM or x64.

Right, because that means the application is "unbuildable." It means you have a .mozconfig. All those are supported options. (Hint: I'm replying to you in it.)

I've also got VLC, LibreOffice and GIMP on this machine using the regular Fedora packages. They work fine. If you're going to be biased against the machine as a workstation, at least try to use one first.

Cameron Kaiser

[Sonadow]

I'm running this in current Firefox which I built from source at -O3 -arch=power9, so I don't know where you're getting that from.

Cameron Kaiser

https://www.talospace.com/2018/09/mo...irefox-62.html

Can't use Jemalloc. Can't do Release build.Can't use Clang. Can't use Gold.

And still no Chromium on POWER. And no stories of successful unpatched source builds working for ffmpeg, VLC, MPV, LibreOffice, FileZilla, Wireshark, tac_plus, OpenLDAP, GIMP and all of their respective dependencies.

And all the out-of-tree drivers for Realtek's 802.11ac USB adapters only support building for ARM or x64.

[classichasclass]

Nice results, but until more applications get a proper upstream port to POWER that does not require making extensive patches to the code it's not even up for consideration as a desktop or workstation.

Upstream Chromium sources are still unbuildable on POWER. Ditto upstream Libreoffice and Firefox. And a bunch of other applications I use on a regular basis.

I'm running this in current Firefox which I built from source at -O3 -arch=power9, so I don't know where you're getting that from.

Cameron Kaiser

[Michael_S]

So they have their "IntegriCloud" cloud-hosting, which looks cool. But it's kind of expensive. Again, you're paying for freedom and innovation and I respect that.

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

Not bogus. But worth keeping in mind. I think a lot of people would consider the cost of more free computing worthwhile. But no, it's not a small difference.