IBM = 12c/96t

[OldChap]

Just a little light reading for you guys....

IBM has taken the wraps off the first servers that are powered by its monstrously powerful Power8 CPUs. With more than 4 billion transistors, packed into a stupidly large 650-square-millimeter die built on IBM?s new 22nm SOI process, the 12-core (96-thread) Power8 CPU is one of the largest and probably the most powerful CPU ever built.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing...erver-monopoly

[Mumak]

I'm waiting for the Knights Landing - that will have much more

[[XC] Lead Head]

I thought IBM was divesting its CPU development?

[vario]

I thought IBM was divesting its CPU development?

They want to sell the division that makes them, not dissolve them, besides this cpu has been "in the making" probably few years, not a month ago when they announced possible sale.

[skycrane]

I WANT IT NOW....

The first Power8 servers will be available from June 10, with a range of 1- and 2-socket 2U and 4U models. The Power S812L and Power S822L (both 2U) will exclusively run Linux. The flagship of the Power8 line is the Power S824, a 4U design with two CPU sockets, maxing out at 24 cores (192 threads) and 1TB of RAM. The low-end Linux-powered S812L server starts at $8000. (IBM wouldn’t tell us the exact pricing of a standalone Power8 CPU, but it’s probably in the region of $5,000.)

Dave, you know someone at IBM that can let us all test some of thiese out for them right????????

[ZX2Slow]

I wonder how these will compete with the Sparc M6 processors.

[bearcatrp]

Since i'm not quite sure how the threads work on this chip, how strong are the threads? AFAIK, the hyperthreads on the intel chips are around 1/3 the strength of a full core, right? Can someone educate me on this processor? Am courious why so many threads but only 12 cores. Would presume each core controls 7 threads.

[Otis11]

Since i'm not quite sure how the threads work on this chip, how strong are the threads? AFAIK, the hyperthreads on the intel chips are around 1/3 the strength of a full core, right? Can someone educate me on this processor? Am courious why so many threads but only 12 cores. Would presume each core controls 7 threads.

I'm not super knowledgeable on this - haven't analysed it too much, but I believe each core controls 8 threads. The reason they do this is because they allow each thread to utilize different parts of the Arithmetic Unit. One can use the ALU, one the DFU, another the AES, FPU and two for the VMX, etc... essentially the Arithmetic Unit is broken into 8 units, so they allowed 8 threads per core to allow it to theoretically get 100% utilization.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong... I looked over the diagram fairly quickly (and failed to read the text. )

[BlindFreddie]

This beastie will not have the x86 instruction set, but is probably a RISC machine similar to the PowerPC used a while ago by crapple macs. If you see pigs flying, there may be a faint glimmer of chance that WCG will do ports of their science programs to it. Otherwise it won't do much good for us WCG-ers.

[skycrane]

i know.. i know, there is nothing other than WCG... but how well do you think it will work for other boinc apps? like Test4Theory, that use scientific linux VMs to do the crunching?

[D_A]

T4T seems to really like single thread performance rather than making use of multiple threads, so I don't know how well it might like these. Multi-threaded workloads where every thread is using the same cpu functions, like running a bajillion WCG units at once, might also suffer as well. These processors look like they'd shine running multiple VMs each doing different kinds of tasks. That's just my opinion based on limited reading of course.

[Mumak]

There's some more information about Knights Landing I'm allowed to share:
- Standalone bootable processor (running the host OS) and a PCIe coprocessor (PCIe end-point device)
- 60+ cores, 3+ TeraFLOPS of double-precision peak performance per single socket node
- Multiple hardware threads per core with improved single-thread performance over the current generation
Intel? Xeon Phi™ coprocessor

Might be a very interesting crunching machine hmmm, (60+) * (x threads).... x=[can't say yet ]

[Otis11]

There's some more information about Knights Landing I'm allowed to share:
- Standalone bootable processor (running the host OS) and a PCIe coprocessor (PCIe end-point device)
- 60+ cores, 3+ TeraFLOPS of double-precision peak performance per single socket node
- Multiple hardware threads per core with improved single-thread performance over the current generation
Intel? Xeon Phi™ coprocessor

Might be a very interesting crunching machine hmmm, (60+) * (x threads).... x=[can't say yet ]

I'm going to venture to guess that x is 4, and 60+ is really 72... so that's 72 cores at 4 threads = 288 threads. Now the part that I'm unsure about is whether these will be boards like the current Xeon Phi, or whether they will be in-socket processors. If we can manage to get BOINC running well on them, and they're anywhere near cost effective, I'd love a few! =-P

Man... 288 threads...

[Mumak]

In-socket as well, so there should be no problem running BOINC there