Continuing the discussion from The Bleeding Edge [Semiconductor Foundry Thread]:
This was really going off topic, but it’s the kind of thing I’d be curious to hear about; so here’s a separate thread.
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Thanks for pulling this out into another thread. Want me to move those posts?
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Yes please
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Obviously taking the bait
Because nothing in the enterprise is compiled for power, so we can’t run that Architecture in the data center.
Same reason the amd arm initiative failed.
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Well geode wasn’t a server chip so…
Also.
Thats the wrong use for POWER anyways lol.
continuing to take the bait
If it’s the wrong use, why are you replying to a server chip video about power then?
My point was that everything is compiled for x86, built for x86 and that means that at the very best case, you can pretty much only run open source software (or Java trash) on arm.
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Tada!
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For raw data processing, we use the power7 system with AIX to run an AS400 at my work.
We have one of these systems in each distribution center, of which there are 20, and each and every $BigPharmaRetail store has there own much smaller version.
Our particular system was upgraded with a data shelf of ~30TiB 10K SAS drives with SSD caching.
We have all this mostly because mainframes have really good uptime and ppc64 arch is more efficient when compared for x86 for our specific workflow.
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Damn, I thought this was about power architecture in datacentres not Power Architecture in datacentres.
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Just to add another industry. Security products with cloud deployments in every region as well as on prem. We use only Intel chips top to bottom.
While I disagree nothing is compiled for power, their market share in my industry is non existent. Even our customers I have yet to come across one.
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I think it makes more sense because it takes time to retool everything for epyc, that and those are general purpose CPU’s. ppc is more specialized I think.
Maybe we need a parallel thread?
Lol hasn’t this happened twice?
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How is POWER not an enterprise datacenter product?
The whole point of OpenPOWER (as I see it) is to increase the user base of POWER chips beyond big enterprises that run primarily AIX or IBM i with only maybe a bit of Linux running on top of PowerVM.
From what IBM will sell you for POWER9 or POWER8, there is only machine of each that comes as a tower rather than a rack-mount server.
The usage as I see it:
PowerVM - big bad serious business stuffTM like SAP HANA
PowerVM WTF - for some reason we need a 16 core server rack with N TiB of RAM that acts like one machine
OpenPOWER IBM - we want a cheaper IBM Linux server
OpenPOWER AC922 - supercomputer dev or AI training
OpenPOWER Barreleye - hyperscalers, currently Google + Rackspace
OpenPOWER Talos - PowerPC + free/libre/open software nerds unite!
Of these, only the Talos crowd would not be using POWER9 in a server setting, and apart from that and Barreleye, everything else is marketed toward enterprise.
ummm AIX?
RHEL supports Power PC
Few other distros keep PPC ISOs around.
Also… IBM has blades designed for Linux on Power.
My work has/is used/using IBM Power servers for Oracle databases on AIX and Intersystems Cache .
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Ahh yup. Fucking Oracle.
Can you give any more detail as to what type of security customers these would be?
Do any of them already use me_cleaner?
Are these more like AV vendors, who (in my opinion) would be more willing to trust proprietary code?
Or something more like an HSM manufacturer? Or a Certificate Authority?
My opinion on security companies is pretty much “snake oil until proven otherwise”, so I would be curious what your experience with them is.