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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
@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.
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:
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 .