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[Dawn]

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...

[Dawn]

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...

[Dawn]

Funny to see all the "it's too expensive!" posts. Me and my co-founder were floored by how cheap this is - bear in mind, it's a two-socket machine....

[Dawn]

Oh, boy. Another chance to engage with Oracle lies about something I don't actually give much of a shit about.

1) http://www.zdnet.com/a...

[Dawn]

Show me where IBM said this. IBM has said per-core performance counts, not that a chip should only have 1-2 of them. Unless you have an actual source...

[Dawn]

As David Wheeler once said,...

[Dawn]

I will use small words, in deference to you.

No IBM server CPU has ever done "many slower cores." Every generation has faster cores...

[Dawn]

There are, actually. A few dozen per generation.



For the most part, yep. The mainframe customer base is largely long-term customers....

[Dawn]

I do have access to a z mainframe (z13 - regrettably no z14 yet) but like I said, IBM is sensitive about public numbers and prefers users to benchmark...

[Dawn]

He is. He's been infamous for that in other places (TheRegister, for instance) for ten years or more. Power9 has no real resemblance whatsoever to T1...

[Dawn]

Kebabbert is an infamous pro-Sun troll that's been posting copypasta about how slow z supposedly is for a decade. https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewt...

[Dawn]

Nope. 24-core is always SMT4. The SMT8 core is basically two SMT4 cores fused together behind a shared L1 cache, and physically the 12c SMT8 chip is very...

[Dawn]

On Power8 you could do it with OCC changes. Power9 should be the same.

Perks of having open-source power management firmware....

[Dawn]

The 24-core processor has 96 threads (4 per core), so you end up with 192 threads on a dual-socket system, not 384....