The only benchmarks I have found so far are the ones on slide 11 of the AIX user group presentation, and those are an older IPC-ish comparison against POWER8 as well as coming with a disclaimer. Realistically, if you want detailed benchmarks, I think you are going to need to wait until POWER9 General Availability (GA) which, if I remember correctly, is 2017 Q4. If you do find performance benchmarks, do tell.
For drivers, again, you probably need to wait for GA before Nvidia is allowed to release public drivers. For POWER8, Nvidia has drivers for RHELand Ubuntu, but only for Tesla cards.
FreeBSD on Talos II might be better than I originally thought; I found on twitter that someone is now doing development on a POWER8 S821LC which should improve FreeBSD bare metal (powernv) operation on POWER chips.
This is development on one generation older than POWER9, and therefore POWER ISA v2.07 not v3.0, so there is a potential for further optimisation.
FreeBSD + ZFS on Talos II? Mwahahaha!
I wonder if this will just be adding to the ppc64 port, or will they add a separate branch. Despite my enthusiasm, I confess I don’t know that much about the PowerPC vs later POWER difference.
As for FreeBSD support @tkoham, I think it will be a while before that happens specifically, but if I understand correctly, both the ROCm and the AMDGPU drivers could be ported.
Also among the recent announcements for the TALOS II, they now added a smaller non-rack option. In talking about GPU choices, they also mentioned “integrated 2D VGA graphics”, which makes me wonder what the chip behind this is. In my ignorance, I had at first assumed that the VGA DE-15 connector on the mainboard was something for the BNC, but it is just for the mainboard graphics.
There’s early work on a foundation for making this possible, but ‘could’ does not necessarily include ‘working well.’
The bsd core team generally has to budget development for the widest market. It’s a smaller community, so it makes more sense not to duplicate work. Right now, bhyve, iocage/iohyve, and the base are the most important projects to them. AMD support will only hit a high priority when their marketshare reaches close to half, most likely.
The ports in question are driven off of the Microsemi SAS controller, so they work for both SAS and SATA. USB is driven by a TI USB 3.0 controller; serial is passed through the BMC (standard OpenPOWER design).
I would also like to know what make & model the SATA controller is and the model of the Broadcom NIC chip for example.
BCM5719. There’s some good info about the internals of the chip online [1] that provides a starting point to write a replacement firmware if you’re interested. Otherwise, like all other peripherals, the NIC is behind the IOMMU and cannot access data in the CPU domain without kernel permission.
So the 4x SATA ports are optional and powered by PM8069, and they will only be present if you checkbox the “Integrated Microsemi SAS Controller (Proprietary)” on the purchase page, correct? Or in other words: if you don’t checkbox “Integrated Microsemi SAS Controller (Proprietary)” you will receive a board with no SATA ports?
Correct. Given the advantages of NVMe especially for a high-power development system like the Talos™ II this was considered an acceptable tradeoff.
[the BCM NIC] is the only device on the board that requires firmware, but it is behind the IOMMU and the FSF has indicated that we can still obtain RYF with this limitation.
“on mark”? I’m not sure I understand, but I am certainly pining for it until I come up with the necessary funds.
Realistically, I’ll probably end up getting a Librem from Purism first, since those are less than half the price of a Talos box but that just means I’ll be using the Librem to stare longingly at the Talos store page. Or at Sierra and Summit.
POWER9 is still under NDA, until that ends Raptor can’t even release benchmarks. We have pictures of the mainboard, so it obviously exists; Raptor looks like they are fulfilling their obligations for KGPE-D16 OpenBMC porting so I see no reason not to trust them to deliver it. All in all, this doesn’t look like vapourware to me.
8-core Sforza POWER9 chips for the Talos II are now for sale, still far below the core counts IBM is willing to sell in AC922 machines (16, 18, 20, or 22 cores).
Assuming that the AC922 uses either Monza or LaGrange chips, this would suggest a weird situation in which smaller Sforza chips (50 mm) are getting lower yields than larger chips (68.5 mm). Or are limited core count Sforza chips perfectly fine, but working cores are fused off to allow for segmentation?
Edit: AC922 uses Monza chips; it connects 2 or 3 GPUs via NVLink per socket, while LaGrange can only connect 1 GPU per socket using NVLink.
Here, can we just make a new thread for general POWER and PowerPC news? At least I want to. This is getting gimped along and I’ve been thinking about the mods lately. That and I don’t want to start another trigger war in the lounge.
Thoughts? I actually wanna delve into POWER9 and soon I’m starting an assembly project that I’m going to translate to PPC.
but that just means I’ll be using the Librem to stare longingly at the Talos store page. Or at 