Monday, February 15, 2016

More about the Talos POWER8

Lest it seem like I'm not shilling enough for the Talos POWER8 workstation, the closest thing to a Power Mac you're (hopefully) going to get in 2016, let me pimp it some more. Raptor Engineering has dropped the price a bit to $3000 US and updated the specifications over the weekend; particularly interesting to me is that QEMU virtualization is supported, making the prospect of running Power Mac software on it under virtualization very possible. Supported OSes include a decent range of Linux distributions, and little-endian mode (so-called "ppc64le") is supported too which should improve graphics card support, though I like big endian and I cannot lie and you other brothers can't deny.

Phoronix has also done some early benchmarking on a test system Raptor gave them access to. This is notable because this means the damn thing actually exists. Although OpenBenchmarking calls it "57 cores," that's probably an artifact of SMT (my POWER6 has two cores and two threads per core, so AIX thinks it has four logical cores; my bet is that this is an 8-core system and POWER8 has eight threads per core, with some reserved for the kernel, hence "57"). Raptor has published their own set of benchmarks, but they tested against a Sandy Bridge Xeon and an AMD Opteron 6328, so I'm not sure how useful that comparison is; the Phoronix tests are against more current competitors, which I think is a fairer fight. Although they reported only three tests in that article, on the two tests where the Talos was on equal footing with the other systems (i.e., had access to the same acceleration or there weren't x86-specific optimized paths) it was nearly neck and neck with the top-ranked Xeon and Haswell i7s -- and remember you get the CPU and the motherboard for that $3K. Performance will only get better as the various Linux distros improve their support for the POWER8's capabilities. You can read some other interesting tidbits in the discussion thread.

So, again, if you're at all interested, please put in your (non-binding but do be serious) interest. Rumour has it their threshold is 2,000 units for a production run.

11 comments:

  1. Thank you for providing us with this information. Now what can we do? Well, we all are not computer hardware engineer. You write only about the motherboard. How to choose the graphics card? What about 2 x16 Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) capable PCIe slots (8 shared lanes) ? Can we plug graphic card on it? Or just in ordinary PCIe Slot? In this case any graphics card PCI Express x8 works or is it a bit more complicated? What about power supply of this motherboard? Too many other questions in fact, but I am busy with others things. Can you make a standard configuration for basic users, others users than basic users can make their own?

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    1. Don't take this the wrong way, but if you're not already in the business of knowing how to build your own system, this machine is probably going to be way too expensive to learn with. I see this being an opportunity for experienced users who want a powerful box that's not x86 and has as little "blobs" in it as possible, not as a general user machine for people with a general user skill set in most cases. Perhaps we'll get to a point where it is, but definitely not in this iteration.

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  2. This workstation sounds interesting, but I prefer laptops and cheap desktops. Is anybody working on a POWER version of one of those?

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  3. Sadly Linux on PPC is really flaky. Have tried countless 'Live Discs' only to find they all seem to have some minimum number of chickens that must be sacrificed before they can be asked to boot.

    Live discs are a bit flaky (don't work about 50% of the time in x86/AMD64), but on PPC it is like the proverbial 1-legged cat burying turds on a frozen pond.

    It seems that Debian itself is the only really reliable one. Also, you wind up building a whole heck of a lot of packages to get what you need. PPC-Linux is the Heathkit of computing.

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    1. I don't have enough experience with Linux on Power Macs, so I can't rightly say. Perhaps Dan or zen can comment. However, Linux on *POWER* (i.e., big iron Linux) is very mature and well-tested, and IBM supports it heavily. This would inherit that support, since it's a big-iron CPU in a smaller form factor.

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    2. I'm sorry I'm late here.

      Debian runs absolutely fine on my G5 and on my IntelliStation (POWER5).

      It was just a pain to get it to boot after installing on the POWER5.

      And I seriously have access to all the software I need to survive. Blender runs, video editors run, GIMP runs, VLC, LibreOffice, QEMU... All out of the box, no compiling, no building, nada.

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  4. Well there is the Aeon X5000 that is soon to be introduced. That is powered by an NXP/Freescale 64bit PPC cup.
    Much lower power draw than a Power8 system or a G5 (although with either alternatives to the G5 you can't run OSX).

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    1. The X5000's Freescale P5020 is an e5500 core. Although a solid design, it's not even remotely in the same class as the POWER8, which is designed to be a piledriver microprocessor and is provisioned as such. I'm happy to see updated Amiga hardware and the X5000 looks very nice, but this is a whole different market segment.

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  5. I put my name in. Hoping to use it for FreeBSD development, and as the last machine I need to buy for decades.

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  6. C.K. NOT meaning to threadjack at all - but just have to share - have you visited this site?
    http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-10411ppc/
    (apologies if I'm getting to this party way late).

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  7. Now it reached german media as well (better late than never):

    http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/POWER8-Workstation-mit-offener-Firmware-und-Linux-3219579.html

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