IBM Launches New Linux, Power8, OpenPower Systems

An anonymous reader writes:IBM on Thursday rolled out its latest Power8 processor, which is designed to move data faster, and new servers with OpenPower features. For IBM, the OpenPower Foundation community is critical for its Power8 processor. A bevy of companies are in OpenPower, a group that aims to be a counterweight to x86-based servers. With the new systems, IBM is hoping to target more artificial intelligence, analytics, and deep learning workloads. The systems will be lumped into the Power Systems LC family of Linux servers. Big Blue's Power S822LC for High Performance Computing server is the headliner of the group, with the Power8 processor with Nvidia's Tesla P100 Pascal GPUs. The system also has Nvidia's NVLink processor that allows for high-speed bidirectional interconnects. IBM said the combination of IBM and Nvidia technology allows data to flow five times faster than an x86-based system.

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

Sparc is still around surprisingly and Oracle is selling tons of systems.

Re: Not again!

[hackwrench]

People like to talk in absolutes, though. Central planning is always bad or always good. Capitalism is always bad or always good. Vaccines are always good or they cause autism and you won't like hugs. Instead we should be looking out for appropriate use cases and look for potential problems and where they crop up with everything.

Re:

[malditaenvidia]

Did you just try to sneak anti-vaccine propaganda in a conversation about IBM operating systems, you underhanded asshole?

Re:

[hackwrench]

No. I tried to sneak lyrics from Tim Minchin's The Fence into a conversation about whatever the conversation has drifted to. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Re:

[unixisc]

Which Alpha processor is that?

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[jellomizer]

The real question is are these alternate chips that are x times faster than the competitor (x-y) times the price.
I loved my UltraSparc Ultra 10 Work Station, back in the early 2000's. However I had moved over to intel, because the performance/price just wasn't there.

If the power8 is 5x the speed of intel. however if it costs 6x as much... Is that speed boost really worth it. Or just get additional Intels to do the work.

Also we can get into the complex discussion of CPU performance specifications. Where e

Re:

[unixisc]

Reason is that the RISC companies toss in peripheral circuitry that transmit the enhanced performance throughout the system. That's why SPARC or POWER or MIPS had proprietary peripheral circuitry that matched the speed, and w/ it, the cost of that increases. Also, toss in the fact that RISC systems never had the economics of scale - not even the Itanium - and the story is complete!

I'm more interested in the OS side of things - how IBM has totally gone Linux. It would have been nice had IBM offered the

Re:

[dwywit]

As far as I'm aware, they also offer i or OS400/whatever it's called these days.

Re:

[RicktheBrick]

IBM is behind World Community Grid. They have contributed about 250 million results. They are not slowing down either. If one could produce these results at say a nickel a result in electricity cost than they have spent an additional 12.5 million dollars. But they are still asking for volunteers to produce results which should be a lot cheaper for them to produce themselves. Their cloud business should be able do this without much problems. Their must be a reason why they are still pushing distributed

Re:

[Darinbob]

Yes, what's wrong with Sparc?

What's wrong with SPARC?

[shanen]

Yes, what's wrong with Sparc?

Oracle.

However the bigger problem, the veritable elephant in the room, is the increasing dominance of evil companies. When was the last time you got to choose the best company (or politician) instead of the least bad option? The rules of the game are written for bribes, and the biggest bribers are NOT the nicest guys in the room.

Rather the people bribing the politicians to write their favorite rules have massive and incurable problems. There is NO amount of money that would satisfy them. Their companies and

All Important Question

[Anonymous Coward]

SystemD ?

Re:

[unixisc]

I was curious about that as well - would IBM offer a systemd free system? It could have, had they offered something like FreeBSD on this baby

POWER9 must be far away

[Freedom Bug]

They pre-announced POWER9 a couple of weeks ago. So new POWER8 announcements are kind of a let down. Obviously POWER9 must be a ways away, then. You've got to move fast to have any chance of competing with Intel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[rijrunner]

This is fairly standard. They usually hit their + or express version at the midpoint between major updates. The timeline for this looks to be very much in line with their previous releases. Three calendar years between major releases with a + version about halfway between.

Re:

[Narcocide]

This is gonna change some shit man. The success of the Raspberry Pi has proven that CPU performance is not everything.

Re:

[OrangeTide]

These days (really for the last decade) the one with the best fab has the highest performance chips and it has little to do with the CPU instruction set.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for your contribution, Pajeet. Your custom Intel t-shirt will be sent out within 3 business days.

Re:Can Slashdot stop post IBM advertisements?

[blane.bramble]

Meanwhile, in the real world, most systems are not CPU bound but IO bound. If Power8 lives up to the hype, it's a very interesting prospect.

Summary: go back to Call of Duty.

Re:

[Dadoo]

Meanwhile, in the real world, most systems are not CPU bound but IO bound.

Seriously. According to IBM's literature, entry-level pSeries systems do 96GBps per socket. I don't know of any Intel-based systems that can even touch that, in the price range they're talking about.

I wonder if their process synchronization/IPC is faster, too.

Re:

[Darinbob]

When will Slashdot stop being an apologist for creaky old Intel designs?

Re:

[cheesybagel]

You don't have a clue what you are talking about. POWER has high performance. It's just expensive like heck. But then again their clients are willing to pay the price.

It was the first processor with large embedded DRAM caches that I can think of. It has 4-way SMT, decimal floating point, hardware transactional memory, and gobs of memory bandwidth.

It's not optimized for low-power operation though. It's for people who care about performance and backwards compatibility with legacy IBM hardware.

Re:

[unixisc]

I thought that from POWER7 starting onwards, they were optimized for low power, since that's been the mantra of computing ever since multicore burst on the scene.

Re:

[unixisc]

I thought that IBM is out of the business of making computers, and is just an expensive alternative to the likes of Accenture, HCL, Cognizant and so on

Re:

[TheSunborn]

They are talking about the flow of data, between the PowerPC cpu and the nVidia graphics card. It's fast because they are using a special nVidia link, but I don't really think this matters a lot in most use cases.

Btw: The cheepest version comes with 2 cpus each with 8 cores, and cost over 9000$.

Re:

[unixisc]

Is there any PowerPC left anymore? I thought it disappeared when Apple dropped the PowerMacs, and more so later when Apple bought PAsemi

Re:

[damnbunni]

NXP (formerly Freescale) and AMCC are still making PowerPC-based chips, mostly for embedded applications.

Re:

[dbIII]

but I don't really think this matters a lot in most use cases.

For most use cases the Power is vastly overpriced so you get it only for those use cases for things like feeding a pile of nvidia cards for numerical processing.
There are a lot of situations in cluster computing where that is useful and the number of situations is increasing as the onboard memory on those cards increases.
Currently on x86_64 systems there's a lot of situations where feeding the cards takes as much time as it would to solve the pro

Re:

[unixisc]

Yeah, for starters, who fabs this CPU? How many cores does it have, and how does it compare to the various Xeons? Or even an Itanium? Will we see it in the next Watson? Also, which other vendors will be using this CPU to make their systems?

Price?

[MachineShedFred]

So that's great that data can flow 5x what an x86 server can do. Does it cost 10x as much? Because if it does, you're likely better off with x86.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

The processor on the open market is reasonably priced, at least the 8 core/64 threads version at the lowest frequency/power dissipation.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

So that's great that data can flow 5x what an x86 server can do. Does it cost 10x as much? Because if it does, you're likely better off with x86.

Because electricity and cooling are both free, right?

If the one bottleneck on your workload is GPU bandwidth, if it's 5x faster, but only 10x as expensive, it's probably a LOT cheaper to buy and run the one POWER than the five x86s over the lifetime of the servers, assuming the x86 boxes draw about same amount of power as one POWER server.

Re:

[rijrunner]

My experience is that 10x as much is a very generous estimate. It is often worse.

Re:

[unixisc]

Is AIX still there? Or has it been EOLed?

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[Gravis Zero]

So that's great that data can flow 5x what an x86 server can do. Does it cost 10x as much? Because if it does, you're likely better off with x86.

unless space and power consumption are a factor... like in a datacenter.

What?

[IMightB]

What is New Linux?

Re:

[JoeDuncan]

Some kind of IBM branded distro? Like we need a new linux distro though, ugh. Couldn't they just pick one off the shelf?

Re:

[Hognoxious]

If it follows the pattern of New Labour and New Coke, it's Win ME.

Why doesn't IBM respect old employees as much?

[shanen]

Whenever I hear about IBM these days, the main thought in my head is "age discrimination". More so when the story is about pumping cash into propping up ancient products with minor improvements. It would be nice if they treated old humans with as much respect as old products, eh?

Details available upon polite request, but it's hard for me to imagine why anyone would be interested in details about IBM these years. Something about cognitive solutions in the cloud? Or has the buzz-phrase changed again?