[HN Gopher] IBM Power10 Coming to Market: E1080 for 'Frictionles...
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IBM Power10 Coming to Market: E1080 for 'Frictionless Hybrid Cloud
Experiences'
Author : rbanffy
Score : 53 points
Date : 2021-09-09 12:15 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anandtech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anandtech.com)
| jstx1 wrote:
| I still don't get what hybrid cloud is and how much of it is
| marketing and how much is actually useful tools, services and/or
| infrastructure.
| imglorp wrote:
| The other commenters mention multi-cloud use cases but another
| case is prem-cloud hybrid. You may want some of your business
| on prem for whatever reason but be able to move workloads to
| various clouds and back, for price, load, or whatever reason.
| jstx1 wrote:
| So if that's the set-up (on-prem + a cloud provider), what's
| being sold as a hybrid cloud solution - some services that
| allow you to manage them better or something else? What are
| some examples?
| pm90 wrote:
| AWS Outpost and GCP Anthos are examples of hybrid cloud
| services.
|
| At first cloud providers created tools to make it easier to
| migrate/connect your on prem to your cloud environments.
| I'm guessing what usually happened was that some workloads
| would get migrated but others would remain on prem (for
| various reasons) so cloud providers started building
| products that made "your Data Center in our cloud". Ie
| deploy cloud-like services within your Data Center so your
| developers have access to the same interface regardless of
| where the workload is deployed.
| Closi wrote:
| Chips that are architecturally similar / behave like the
| cloud platforms, and they are claiming it is designed to
| allow a higher container density (i.e. run more containers
| at once, where some of those containers might have very
| little activity).
| imglorp wrote:
| AWS is probably further along than the others throwing
| offerings at the wall. They let you do things like have a
| single api that can manage your stuff on your prem and in
| their cloud. It can look like containers, like VM's, like a
| VPN, all sorts of options. Sometimes it sticks to the wall.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/hybrid
| pjmlp wrote:
| Basically having mixed deployments across cloud environments,
| with services that ease application management and deployment
| across them.
|
| Sure one can do that today, but consulting shops and cloud
| vendors need new products for keeping the board happy with
| exponential growth.
| dakial1 wrote:
| Cloud was a great option in the beginning because oh the
| elasticity, less cost and effort to maintain (in comparison to
| on prem). But, as companies as AWS, Google, MS and IBM worked
| to lock their clients in, costs have risen and the cloud
| economic benefit faded, some companies tried multicloud, that
| worked for a while and now some companies are actually moving
| some of their infrastructure back to on prem, so there is the
| hybrid cloud case. What I've seen is companies covering their
| base demand with on prem and leave the cloud to deal with the
| elastic part of their demand. If costs change sides, they can
| also use more cloud and less on prem and vice versa.
| playcache wrote:
| It's mostly around federation and abstraction of the lock in's
| of a particular cloud provider.
|
| For example, I might want to run my own hardware for a certain
| reason and then also run workloads on AWS, but I don't want to
| have to manage different sets of API's , auth methods etc.
| hughrr wrote:
| It's about putting things in the cheapest place with the lowest
| risk.
| peytoncasper wrote:
| I agree to some point with the other commenters. But the
| reality is that almost every enterprise of any size will be
| hybrid cloud for quite some time if not forever. It's
| impossible to lift and shift everything at once which means you
| need the infrastructure to connect those environments
| regardless.
|
| On top of that you've still go some applications that run on
| platforms that just aren't compatible and will need to be
| either rebuilt or left to run on-premise indefinitely.
|
| Additionally, getting back to their other comments. I think
| there is some logic around data being viewed as "heavy" given
| the egress costs on most clouds. Having one place which you can
| easily upload data to any new environment that pops up for
| cheaper seems like a decent idea. Then again, a lot of money
| related things can be solved by simple contract negotiation, so
| maybe it's not worth it.
| jstx1 wrote:
| > you need the infrastructure to connect those environments
| regardless
|
| What does that infrastructure look like? What are some
| examples?
| tyingq wrote:
| One example would be an on-prem object storage device
| that's capable of replicating data to AWS S3.
| pm90 wrote:
| One example would be to use "interconnects" which link your
| data center to the cloud through a high capacity (maybe low
| latency?) "dedicated" line. So basically you have private
| IP connectivity between your DC and a virtual private cloud
| (VPC) so your workloads "think" they're on the same private
| IP network. I thought of interconnects as beefy VPNs (but
| this may not be accurate, just a helpful mental aid).
|
| Note: I'm using mostly GCP terminology,
| https://cloud.google.com/hybrid-connectivity
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Would love to see one of these in a Raptor Talos machine.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| Here is a relevant article
|
| https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=IBM-POWE...
| mnd999 wrote:
| I was thinking the same, I dunno if they sold well enough to
| justify a new version, but I hope so. I've been tempted several
| times, but it seems like quite a lot of money for a Linux box
| that probably has quite a lot of subtle incompatibility quirks.
| p_l wrote:
| The problem currently isn't how many sold, but issues
| regarding IP that RCS (reasonably) does not want to
| compromise on. Issues that block, for now, a new POWER10
| system unless you still want blobs, just not shipped on-board
| - and want to pay ridiculous prices for unique memory
| modules.
| mnd999 wrote:
| Ahh, that's a shame. Blobs would kill the whole thing dead
| for a large proportion of their customer base. Let's hope
| they find a way to resolve it.
| dragontamer wrote:
| There seems to only be two blobs in POWER10. The memory
| controller and something about I/O.
|
| The question is what to do about it. Maybe an open source
| firmware rewrite can happen. Or maybe IBM needs to make a
| cheaper desktop version first with a more open DDR4/5
| controller?
|
| That advanced RAM module isn't needed for desktop level
| workloads anyway.
|
| Either way, 2022 is out. Maybe 2023 will have thing line
| up better?
| p_l wrote:
| There is only one blob that can't be recreated from
| source that is needed for a working system, and that's
| OMI-DDR4 interface. There's talk of reversing it, but
| nobody has the time or resources. So long as said chip is
| the only source for making a motherboard that doesn't
| require OMI memory modules (which have the same chip
| anyway), there's a problem.
|
| EDIT: Hah, I missed the PPE discussion recently. There's
| now some ppl looking towards reversing that too, but
| again, not RCS itself AFAIK nobody has seen non-OMI
| POWER10 cpu on the road map.
| ksec wrote:
| What is the intended usage for that? As in used in
| Consumer PC ?
|
| Would microWatts [1] fit that purpose? Not only do you
| have an Open ISA as in OpenPower, you also have an Open
| implementation of that ISA. AFAIK RISC-V doesn't have
| anything similar, only open source design in embedded
| usage.
|
| Otherwise a low cost POWER10 ( or now Power10 without the
| capital... and I hate it ) wont make much sense. You are
| talking about ~30mm2+ per core design. It is huge.
|
| [1] https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Or maybe IBM needs to make a cheaper desktop version
| first
|
| I doubt that will happen. For that to happen, there would
| need to be a market for low-end POWER servers. Low-end
| means low-margin and competition from x86 boxes. There
| may be space for a low-spec IBM machine (a POWER-based
| descendant of the AS/400), and I imagine the IBM i
| subsidizes a lot of the development of the AIX-based
| POWER boxes (because they are the same hardware).
|
| I really think IBM should spend some money on entry-level
| boxes for their exclusive platforms (P, I and Z). I don't
| see I or Z going anywhere - they are good enough and too
| expensive/risky to migrate away from, but P and AIX are
| too close to generic x86 hardware running Linux for them
| to feel too comfortable. Right now, it's hard to justify
| even suggesting a green field project using anything
| that's not a commodity platform. Being less expensive
| doesn't help when the minimum sticker price is more than
| 100K. Chances are development would start on generic
| boxes or cloud and stay there. IBM is the only company
| that can make POWER competitive with x86 at an entry-
| level and a single-core SMT8 part would probably be a
| justifiable expense for many R&D departments.
|
| > with a more open DDR4/5 controller?
|
| My impression is that the Power Axon interface would be
| able to control DDR4/5 memory.
| classichasclass wrote:
| The OMI issue is probably solvable with an open
| controller. Not a trivial undertaking but OMI, at least,
| is documented.
|
| The on-chip PPE I/O controller is a bigger problem. I
| suspect, but don't know, that it's the PCIe interface. If
| so, I can't think of an easy way of getting around it.
| aww_dang wrote:
| In an ideal world, IBM would help cultivate the ecosystem
| Raptor is creating.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I'd say that releasing all the other firmware of POWER10
| as open source is a big deal still.
|
| They didn't reach Raptor's high-standard of open
| firmware, but POWER10 is probably one of the most open
| CPUs out there in the modern marketplace.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Don't forget: https://www.talospace.com/2021/02/a-better-theory-
| on-why-the...
| datameta wrote:
| What a privilege it is to contribute to P10. OMI is mind-
| bogglingly fast and will be an even greater advantage during the
| enterprise DDR5 era.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Such a beast. I would love to play with one of these. Other than
| some really serious CFD or EM field simulations I don't know if I
| could keep it busy :-)
| wallacoloo wrote:
| So how do these stack up against running that same workload
| (simulations) on a powerful GPU? Often a sim requires running
| the same operation over thousands of different cells: it seems
| really suited to the "warp" style of parallelism, where all
| cores in a set run the same instruction in lockstep. Or SIMD,
| but that's usually a bit more effort to port. LLVM has a spirv
| backend these days, so does POWER actually make sense for these
| workloads outside of places where it's difficult to port your
| codebase?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Generally it depends on the working set. Massively parallel
| architectures with shared visibility into a coherent memory
| space can often more efficiently compute volumetric problems.
| Doing the same problems on GPUs involve a lot of data
| shuffling and you end up on the wrong side of Amdahl's law.
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