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

[JustRob]

SMT8 tops out at 12-core in P9. An SMT8 Power9 core is effectively two SMT4 Power9 cores fused together for software licensing reasons (ie, reducing license costs on per-core licensed software.) These SMT8 cores are unlikely to show up in OpenPower at all and are really oriented toward AIX/iSeries users.

12 core is dual processor only, so you will have 24 cores. Single or dual configuration is only supported for 8 and 10 core processors.

AIX or IBM i only support utilization of 25% of the total number of cores present, if you want your OS to use all your cores you'll have to run Linux.

[phuclv]

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.

you're comparing oranges to apples. A consumer PC in the beginning of the '90s may cost 2k-5k USD. Nowadays it's a lot less than $1k. Workstations and gaming machines are for completely different markets, and they were definitely a lot more than $2k at the time (if the 3D gaming market existed, unfortunately people often played DOS games which didn't require a lot of power)

[Dawn]

There's a Presentation about POWER9 performance here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKwros3Bk2k .

There are 24 Cores and SMT8 coming, like many 2S MBs you'll want to buy 2 CPUs or all the board's features won't be enabled.

I assume Raptor's MB uses a standard Power Supply, it should have a voltage switch. Standard POWER9 Motherboards (from other companies, that follow the OpenServer Spec) use a Lunchbox (supplies 48V), details here: http://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Server/Working unless you put it in an OpenRack sized rack.

SMT8 tops out at 12-core in P9. An SMT8 Power9 core is effectively two SMT4 Power9 cores fused together for software licensing reasons (ie, reducing license costs on per-core licensed software.) These SMT8 cores are unlikely to show up in OpenPower at all and are really oriented toward AIX/iSeries users.

[JustRob]

Is the mainboard a ATX formfactor standard mainboard? or E-ATX?

or what kind of standard does the mainboard follow?

why 4core cpus ? amd claims they have 24core cpus per socket ?

is the power supply for US standards only 120volt? or for European 240volts to ?

There's a Presentation about POWER9 performance here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKwros3Bk2k .

There are 24 Cores and SMT8 coming, like many 2S MBs you'll want to buy 2 CPUs or all the board's features won't be enabled.

I assume Raptor's MB uses a standard Power Supply, it should have a voltage switch. Standard POWER9 Motherboards (from other companies, that follow the OpenServer Spec) use a Lunchbox (supplies 48V), details here: http://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Server/Working unless you put it in an OpenRack sized rack.

[WorBlux]

if you thought i was saying, cell phone or xbox cpu from several years ago is better than POWER9, you simply didnt read my post.

"these cores each have 4 or 8 threads ...."
yes lets pretend these cores do magic that no1 else has ever heard of or seen. throw in a couple of buzz words like SMT4 or SMT8 and if that doesnt sell i dont know what does.

by the time you have 8 threads on a POWER9 cpu, each thread is down to a single instruction decoder, and at that point that thread's performance will be several folds lower than the AMD jaguar IPC for same clock

4 core workstation is still a joke.

I dont believe it will compile linux any better than 4x less time, than AMD jaguar 8 core from 3 years ago, but the price is like 30 folds higher, nevermind, 8 core AMD CPUs from this year

I was 2/3 of the way through reasearching piplines, instruction and execution unit count and feature, until I found a number that gave me a brain boner. 7TB/s. That's the bandwidth of the on-chip fabric the full 24-core SO or 12-core SU chip. And the CAPI feature is made to make the memory space of a thread transparent to all of it's accelerators,

The cut down 4-core probably won't have quite that bandwidth, but I would assume guess something like 2TB/s. For comparison, Naples has Maybe 670GB/s (340 Memory, 130 PCE-e and 160 in the fabric) Skylake-EP claims a max of 786GB/s of and 2-core system.

[phoron]

LOL, indeed. The comparison you're trying to make is absurd. A single Power9 core could dance in circles around your 8-core ARM cell phone and probably an 8-core Jaguar as well. The Jaguar CPU is a low-cost/value CPU; it has a low clock speed and is not multi-threaded.

Yes. Furthermore for performance there's also the memory and I/O bandwith. I don't know for the systems that were compared to but I doubt they come anywhere close to Talos II. The importance of core count depends on the workload (and the importance of bandwidth too, but I think not so much).

Edit: I now doubt I was clear. I meant most tasks benefit from high bandwith, but only some from many cores. You could have tasks that end faster with many cores and little bandwith (very parallel computation on little data? what would that be ? key derivation algorithms if any is parallelizable ?, maybe some specific kind of neural nets wiht complex thresholds or so? NP algorithms on graphs that fit on caches?), but I think they're not common. Most of the time if you need so much computing you use so much data. I didn't mean to say bandwith is not so important, only that its importance does not depend so much on the task (compared with core count).

[phoron]

what kind of power supply standard do this mainboard needs? ATX EPS Flex-ATX Pico SFX SFX-L TFX
???????

IF ATX standard what version ? ab 2.2 (186) ab 2.3 (181) ab 2.31 (81) ab 2.4 ( ??

I'm told "The power supply is standard ATX. We recommend a PSU with dual 12V EPS connectors in case you want to use two CPUs." .
But I think I'll wait for later to look for power supplies, maybe I'll have a better idea for watts for my use case, or more specific documentation.
All I needed to know is that it is a power supply you can get in a computer parts shop, nothing terribly fancy.

[Michael_S]

you are wrong a 4core power9 cpu does not have 8 threads it does have 16 threads ... and even the power8 was 40% faster per core than a intel Xeon system.

means this 8core (2*4cores) workstation will act like a modern 12core Xeon workstation.

And this is the lowest lowend power9 cpu you can get there are models with up to 24 cores (96 threads)

I'm not trusting your assertions or his until I see Power9 benchmarks.

[GI_Jack]

For what it is, this is very much underpriced.

You are getting mini-computer hardware, far bellow minicomputer price. This is also not really a consumer grade product.

This is not a consumer gaming rig, but a high performance IBM chip. I do wonder how this will stack up against the latest SPARC chips.

The other big problem, is even though it is worth the price tag, I cannot think of a single use case for this professionally.

[no1_in_particular]

You do know that these POWER cores are a LOT more powerful then the puny ARM and embedded x86 Jaguar cores in your cellphone and Xbox respectively? Furthermore, these cores each have 4 or 8 threads (depending on if the core is SMT4 or SMT8). That's 16 or 32 threads that will clobber your poor Xbox One.

if you thought i was saying, cell phone or xbox cpu from several years ago is better than POWER9, you simply didnt read my post.

"these cores each have 4 or 8 threads ...."
yes lets pretend these cores do magic that no1 else has ever heard of or seen. throw in a couple of buzz words like SMT4 or SMT8 and if that doesnt sell i dont know what does.

by the time you have 8 threads on a POWER9 cpu, each thread is down to a single instruction decoder, and at that point that thread's performance will be several folds lower than the AMD jaguar IPC for same clock

4 core workstation is still a joke.

I dont believe it will compile linux any better than 4x less time, than AMD jaguar 8 core from 3 years ago, but the price is like 30 folds higher, nevermind, 8 core AMD CPUs from this year