Talos II POWER9 Workstation With OpenBMC, PCI-E 4.0 Up For Pre-Ordering

[Dawn]

OpenPOWER released the spec documentation (POWER ISA v3.0B) on their site back in March.

https://openpowerfoundation.org/?resource_lib=power-isa-version-3-0

Go for it!

The Power ISA manual and the Power9 processor user's manual are two different things. The former is public; the latter is on the OpenPower documentation portal but requires an entitlement from IBM to access, and they aren't currently giving it out.

Since my company does compilers and dynamic translators, the Power9 manual is the important part.

[torsionbar28]

To be fair, people today aren't spending that kind of money.

Apple disagrees. $2k is the very bottom low end of their Pro models. It's true that as compared with my 486 from 1994, people today don't *have* to spend that kind of money to get a basic home pc any more. But this POWER9 workstation is not a basic home pc.

My point was only that people can and do regularly spend $2k on a personal computer - it's not some luxury reserved for the rich as M@GOid claims. Every coffee shop near me is packed with tattooed hipsters sitting there with $2k macbook pro's sipping $5 lattes.

This doesn't even take into account inflation. $2000 in 1994 is equal to $3300 today. So at $2300, this Talos POWER9 is actually a lot cheaper and more affordable than the $2000 486 was in 1994.

My kid put together a screaming 1920x1080 resolution gaming machine with all new parts for $550 earlier this year.

The progress of technology is a wonderful thing, isn't it? A $550 gaming pc was a pipe dream just a few years ago. However it's not in the same class as a POWER9 workstation, so it should not be used for comparison.

So the question is where that Power9 chip falls compared to the different Xeon offerings in performance per dollar and performance per watt.

Bingo, comparing like-kind systems, we must look at Xeon offerings to see whether this new POWER9 board is a good value or not. So until we can perform these benchmarks, we do not yet have enough information to judge whether it's a good value for the price. Of course it's hard to put a price tag on the value of binary-blob free computing, but its safe to assume a premium is warranted. If we assume that it performs "similarly" to same-price Xeon, then this POWER9 system is in fact quite a good deal for the price.

[chithanh]

So the mobo, two POWER9 quad-cores and HSF assemblies will cost $2750. I wonder if we will have the option to install CPUs with higher core count. IBM has announced POWER9 with up to 24 cores.
Anyway, for that money, you can buy a Core i9-7980XE ($1.999), LGA2066 mobo ($300-$600) and still have some change left for a good CPU cooler.
Or an EPYC 7551P ($2199) with SP3 mobo (pricing yet unknown, but $500 for a single socket mobo seems not far fetched given the dual-socket H11DSi costs less than 600€ here).
Or for half the price, a Threadripper X1950 + TR4 mobo.

It will be interesting to see how Talos fares against those.

[onicsis]

The price of a Power9 CPU is as much as an average Intel Xeon. Actually the motherboard is the one that increases the price, this being the expensive component from system.
motherboard is who raise the price, this most expensive component from system. There is a need for more manufacturers of Power9 motherboards to be present on the market. With a bigger and more diverse offer and more or less integrated features. Anyway the beginning is promising, even the price is high for average Joe

[M@GOid]

You're joking right? It wasn't that many years ago when a typical consumer desktop PC or laptop was $2000+. The 486 I bought in 1994 cost more than $2k, and I was pretty poor at the time, so I went down to the bank and applied for a loan to buy it. Heck, even today, a "gamer" pc can easily exceed $2k. Have you priced a Macbook Pro or Mac Pro lately?

Compare this to any Xeon workstation from Dell or whoever, and $2300 is cheaper than the comparable Xeon system. This is a powerful workstation with ECC memory, it compares directly with Xeon and Opteron (soon Epyc) based workstations. What world do you live in, where such systems cost even less than this one does??

What, did you think this machine is for grandma to check her dial-up AOL account from the trailer park? Sounds like maybe a Raspberry Pi is more your speed.

1994 was 23 years ago. A couple decades, old man. :-) My brother bought a Pentium 166MX in 1996 for less than half of that. I dunno why your 486 have to be so expensive back then.

Please consider that I said average dude on my previus comment, not a deep pocket gamer or a professional developer or whatever that need a workstation to do his/her job.

Also, consider that my critique is towards the price to get a "blob free" system, not their desire to bring the newest IBM CPU to the consumer market.

[WolfpackN64]

Also, consider that my critique is towards the price to get a "blob free" system, not their desire to bring the newest IBM CPU to the consumer market.

That's still not a fair criticism. This is a serious workstation and it's presented as such, being "blob free" is only one aspect of the system. It's not like they mean for this machine to get into everyone's hands.

[edwaleni]

The Power ISA manual and the Power9 processor user's manual are two different things. The former is public; the latter is on the OpenPower documentation portal but requires an entitlement from IBM to access, and they aren't currently giving it out.

Since my company does compilers and dynamic translators, the Power9 manual is the important part.

I see what you mean now. I logged into the portal with my account and it takes you in a circular route in and out of 2 websites. I finally landed in the IBM Customer Connect which IBM is not using to distribute OpenPOWER materials (according to IBM). Finally said I wasn't authorized to view the material.

I don't think its an IBM thing per se, its a partner/relationship thing. They paid the $200k plus to be OpenPOWER partners so they get first dibs.

My apologies, when I saw the summary on the POWER ISA guide it said "specifications" and "processor" in the same heading.

[edwaleni]

IBM offers POWER9 in two flavors: Scale-Out (SO) and Scale-Up (SU). The Scale-Out variations are design for traditional datacenter clusters utilizing single- and -dual sockets setups. The Scale-Up variations are designed for NUMA servers with four sockets and up, supporting large memory and throughput.

For the Scale-Out there are two variations, a 12-core SMT8 model and a 24-core SMT4 model. The SMT4 is optimized for Linux Ecosystem whereas the SMT8 is said to be optimized for the PowerVM Ecosystem community (AIX / IBM i customers). Those models support up to 8 channels of DDR4 memory for up to 4 TiB of DDR4-2667 memory (per socket). Those models offer up to 120 GiB/s of sustained bandwidth.

[Michael_S]

Apple disagrees. $2k is the very bottom low end of their Pro models. It's true that as compared with my 486 from 1994, people today don't *have* to spend that kind of money to get a basic home pc any more. But this POWER9 workstation is not a basic home pc.

My point was only that people can and do regularly spend $2k on a personal computer - it's not some luxury reserved for the rich as M@GOid claims. Every coffee shop near me is packed with tattooed hipsters sitting there with $2k macbook pro's sipping $5 lattes.

This doesn't even take into account inflation. $2000 in 1994 is equal to $3300 today. So at $2300, this Talos POWER9 is actually a lot cheaper and more affordable than the $2000 486 was in 1994.


The progress of technology is a wonderful thing, isn't it? A $550 gaming pc was a pipe dream just a few years ago. However it's not in the same class as a POWER9 workstation, so it should not be used for comparison.


Bingo, comparing like-kind systems, we must look at Xeon offerings to see whether this new POWER9 board is a good value or not. So until we can perform these benchmarks, we do not yet have enough information to judge whether it's a good value for the price. Of course it's hard to put a price tag on the value of binary-blob free computing, but its safe to assume a premium is warranted. If we assume that it performs "similarly" to same-price Xeon, then this POWER9 system is in fact quite a good deal for the price.

I understand where you're coming from. But I see two fundamental problems:

1. I believe in free software now because of the four freedoms. But I got interested in free software because as a student and then a recent college graduate I didn't have the money for expensive proprietary software or to deal with the upgrade treadmill of planned obsolescence. "Oh look, now that I have the latest updates in Windows XP my screaming fast computer from 2001 is agonizingly slow in 2003. I guess I need to buy upgrades". I think most other people involved in free software have similar views.

It doesn't matter how cost effective a $6350 product is, we're not going to be excited by the price.

2. This may be a good deal or even a spectacular deal for a multithreaded monster workstation. Even so... how many of us need that? What can we use it for? Can anyone on this thread honestly say they have a use for this beyond "It would be really cool to own"? I totally get the "It would be really cool to own" idea. But I don't $6350 get it.

So what, specifically, would buyers do with this that it's impossible or horribly inefficient to do with a $1000 PC from Best Buy or Amazon.com? (Besides, of course, the huge value of free software top to bottom?)

[CrystalGamma]

If you think $2300 is expensive, you should compare it with the first Talos campaign, where the cheapest option that was supposed to get you a board+CPU cost ~$4500.

For those of you asking if you can get higher core-count CPUs for this board, I've emailed their sales address asking about this, among other things, 3h ago.