The POWER and PowerPC General Discussion / News Thread

Phoronix have been benchmarking a 22 core Power9 against Threadripper:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-threadripper-core9&num=1

Talospace also have some new blogs about using Talos and Power9 which were an interesting read.

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I didn’t even know roadgeeking was a thing:


BTW, I found someone talking about this book on Reddit, as part of a discussion on the design choices for the Cell PPE (some people are not fans of it), and thought this is the kind of book many on this thread would be interested in:

The Race for a New Game Machine
Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3
ISBN: 9780806531014

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Saw this on reddit: https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/BK1B01/intro.html

Thought y’all might enjoy this. It’s OpenPOWER with OSS firmware and stuff: https://git.raptorcs.com/git/

I am not POWER user (never used it) but it’s interesting.

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Yep, looks like they are bundling 8-core chips too:

mainboard CPU cooling Price
BK1B01 Blackbird 4-core None 1174.99 USD
BK1B02 Blackbird 8-core 3U HSF 1499.99 USD

for comparison, without bundling:

Component Price
BK1MB1 (Blackbird) 899.99 USD
CP9M01 (4-core) 375.00 USD
CP9M02 (8-core) 595.00 USD
TL2HS2 (2U heatsink, no fan) 75.00 USD
TL2HS3 (3U HSF) 110.00 USD

Edit: If anyone is curious, the post-thanksgiving sales had dropped the prices to:
799.99 USD for the Blackbird board itself
999.99 USD for BK1B01, the 4-core bundle without heatsink
1329.99 USD for BK1B02, the 8-core bundle with 3U HSF
so they did, temporarily, go below the 875 USD pricepoint they were polling on Twitter.

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@wendell Any updates on the Talos II review?

I have the system, it’s pretty neat so far. I just got it so still testing. What sort of things you guys like to see?

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I’d like to have an idea of how it would be for a day-to-day usage situation. Like, what are the hiccups involved with having a non-x86 CPU?

Additionally, how is GPU support on there? Can we run AMD and Nvidia GPUs with open source software/games and get decent performance, or are we limited?

Moreover, let’s see some benchmarks. I’m sure it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but I’m still interested.

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Testing suggestions

  • Unreal Tournament 4 – Raptor uses this as a demo, but I’d still be curious to see it, since the only video we have is from the IBM POWER8 system they were using to develop/test software; this was back when they were working on the Talos I campaign
  • Blender – again, I think Raptor has demoed this at events, but rendering could make for some nice b-roll (especially with htop)
  • OpenZFS – I’m curious what the state of it is on Power Arch., does it even compile?
  • SuperTux Kart – could be an amusing way to celebrate the addition of networked multiplayer
  • 0ad – It’s listed as working on the wiki porting page, why not?

The TenFourFox developer, who also works on Firefox for Power, made a post about how his Talos II handles the workflow for his roadgeeking hobby. In that post, he mentioned that he successfully uses Firefox, LibreOffice, GNOME Document Viewer, VLC, and Krita.

Something like that, a look at how much of Level1’s daily computing would work on Power, would be really interesting to me. I think I remember @kreestuh talking about Krita in a earlier video, so it would be cool to see her test it, and in so doing, probably some tablet drivers as well. Kdenlive could also be interesting to test, since some Youtubers like The Linux Gamer use it to edit their videos.

Endian testing

I also think it would be really cool to see what the differences are between Little and Big Endian compatibility. I’ve heard that several programs work equally well in both, but the porting pages for Chrome and Firefox show that there are some Endian-specific bugs.

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I’m definitely also interested to see how Wendell and the gang would use a Talos II day-to-day, but I did come across a Adélie Linux dev’s blog post:

There are some wiki pages on GPU compatibility and troubleshooting, this would be the place to start looking:
Talos II/Hardware Compatibility List#Graphics_Cards

For benchmarks, you’re mainly looking at Phoronix for the time being. However, there is a new benchmark article since the one @BGL posted earlier.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-x86-servers

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Are anybody here actually running daily on Power? I am curios about this since the Raptor guys seem to provide fully free CPUs (well software wise at least) and IMO that’s amazing.

If I bought this, I would use it as daily driver for productivity work plus some vintage gaming through emulation. So what would be very interesting on top of the everyday use element, is some emulation related tests. I would like to propose

  1. The use of qemu or better yet hqemu user mode emulation together with binfmt and chroot to see if simple x86 Linux games run well at all. This was actually demoed by Raptor on a Power8 system before in 2016 when they were still contemplating the Talos 1.

  2. If the above is workable then throw Wine on top of it and see how it does. Given the test done at Talospace on this topic, hqemu seems to emulate x86 at around 1/3 the speed? So let’s call it a 1ghz Pentium. So perhaps try games that date back to early 2000s?

  3. The above at the end is emulation so may not work well. But how about vintage gaming through open source emulators like RPCS3, Dolphin and MAME? I wonder if those will compile and work correctly. If they do then it still provides a decent source of old games for leisure.

  4. Away from emulation, I also wonder how well nVidia GPU works on this system. We know nVidia provides binary drivers for their Tesla cards to work on Power9 systems. I wonder if they would be nice enough to leave the codes in there so either GeForce or Quadro cards would work? The Tesla cards have no video output so “useless” as a display card.

  5. If #4 doesn’t work, would a Tesla card combined with an AMD GPU work, through the Looking Glass project? It’s a big ask though if you have a Tesla card lying around, it might be worth a shot?

Those are my wish list items. Really appreciate your insights here.

Thanks

Michael

I have my powerbook with me everywhere but IDK that you’ll count that lol.

I’d love a talos tho. Even if I could live in @wendell 's basement for a weekend and poke it.

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If they were optimized/ported for Power, which they probably aren’t at the moment, RPCS3 and Dolphin could actually end up running faster (potentially), since the PS3, Wii, and GameCube all used PowerPC CPUs. There are potentially some non-standard extensions to implement; for example, the Xbox 360 had increased SIMD with VMX128. Also for the PS3’s Cell, you still have to implement the SPU cores, but again, I’d bet those are more similar to standard Power than x86-64.

An interesting thought, but probably unlikely.
So far only a GeForce 9500 GT has been tested according to the Nvidia section of the Hardware Compatibility List. “No firmware needed” probably means he/she was testing with the Nouveau driver instead.

@wendell I would like to know what is the efficiency of the SMT implementation. I know that they are offering SMT4 and SMT8 solutions. I don’t know which one that you received. I know on the Intel platform, HT basically gives you 1.5 core performance per core. AMD is somewhere around that as well.

I know in the old ppc and power days, the SMT performance was closer to 2 core performance per core before SMT4+. I wonder what the performance is now. One of the reasons that power was “power” hungry was because you had to run at full tilt to get the most performance and efficiency out of the platform. If SMT functions close to the core performance of the thread count, then it is a great time to be alive and we can finally see a shift to alternative architectures becoming mainstream again.

I really plan on picking up a lite to function as a network appliance and build server.

POWER9 Chips

All of Raptor’s boards, Google/Rackspace’s Zaius, and IBM’s AC922 (basically anything intended exclusively for Linux) use the SMT4 versions of POWER9.

The third post in this thread actually has a fairly comprehensive overview, with the same sort of chart that you see on the RCS Wiki, and on Wikipedia’s page:

PowerNV PowerVM
24 × SMT4 Core 12 × SMT8 Core
Scale Out Nimbus codename unknown
Scale Up Cumulus

POWER9 Modules

The “modules”, are more a description of the interposer/socket. AFAIK, all three of the chips described above are the same size silicon, but the module type determines what socket it will use and what IO is available:

Sforza Monza LaGrange
Size 50 mm × 50 mm 68.5 mm × 68.5 mm 68.5 mm × 68.5 mm
Socket LGA 2601 LGA 3899 LGA 3899
Memory 4 × DDR4 8 × DDR4 8 × DDR4
PCIe 4 48 lanes 34 lanes 42 lanes
OpenCAPI None 48 lanes 16 lanes
XBus 4B 1 1 2

XBus is the communication between the two sockets

I’m glad people have minimal interest in this thread again lol.

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Looks like I too had posted about this in the thread earlier.
I should note that the RCS Wiki isn’t quite clear on module types being shared across chip types; but I asked Adi Gangidi about it on Twitter. I did link to that tweet earlier, but it is pretty interesting, so I’ll quote it here:

Let me comment on La Grange Power9 . ( Scale-out Datacenter caterer SKU ) . Yes the SMT8 and SMT4 LaGrange chips can physically fit in same socket . However major difference is in management firmware being qualified on systems built with each chip.

SMT8 chip systems qual’ed with FSP for management , SMT4 chip systems qual’ed w/ BMC for management . As far as I know nothing HW wise prevents for adding support for SMT8 chips with BMC but is not done as of today

Vice-versa ( SMT4 chips being qual’ed with FSP/ PowerVM) won’t happen for licensing reasons . Different structure to use 24 core machine for PowerVM stack. I also suspect lots of cores / lesser SMT is not well suited for typical applications that run on that stack .

@FaunCB Saw this on Twitter and thought of you; someone is testing Void Linux on their Talos II:

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Well theres been work to port to powerpc in my circle. Shouldn’t be hard for him.

Oh damn, I nearly forgot about that! Looks like he’s doing ppc64 big endian too. I should probably get that pull request done soon