POWER8 Pricing?

[Essence_of_War]

I saw that Tyan is producing an ATX MoBo for POWER8.

The Tyan reference board is called the SP010 and a spokesperson for Tyan says that this is a tentative name for the board and adds that it is aimed at small and medium businesses, virtualization, and data analytics. The SP010 has one single-chip module (SCM) variant of the Power8 processor, which, by the way, we learned is code-named “Turismo.” The Tyan board has four DDR3 memory slots, four 6 Gb/sec SATA peripheral connectors, two USB 3.0 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet network interfaces, and keyboard and video. The ATX board measures 12 inches by 9.6 inches, which means it can easily fit in a standard rack or tower server.

Has anyone seen any rumors about pricing, either for power8 or for those mobo's? Is this a sort of, "if you have to ask, you're not the intended audience" situation?

 

[ultimatebob]

Something tells me that IBM would NEVER allow that board to be allowed to be sold at retail. They wouldn't want system builders cannibalizing their System P sales, since they have BIG profit margins on them.

They also wouldn't want to deal with all of the AIX and Linux for POWER driver hassles when someone tries build their own system with IBM unsupported hardware.

 

[Essence_of_War]

That's unfortunate I guess. It sounded like Tyan said they'd be selling it to software developers, but I suppose that's likely to mean only directly sold from Tyan fully assembled, soldered, etc.

 

[Jimzz]

Something tells me that IBM would NEVER allow that board to be allowed to be sold at retail. They wouldn't want system builders cannibalizing their System P sales, since they have BIG profit margins on them.

They also wouldn't want to deal with all of the AIX and Linux for POWER driver hassles when someone tries build their own system with IBM unsupported hardware.

Power8 is open. IBM wants to get out of chip design/making and are selling off as much as they can as fast as they can. So if its as open as they say then something like these could pop up. Maybe not bestbuy retail but still out there.
"IBM and Tyan have agreed to donate the specifications of the reference system to the OpenPower Foundation, which means that members will have access to the specs so they can make customizations of their own."

My inside person has said the deal with GloFlo is about done. They, GloFlo, gets 100-200 IBM engineers and a lot of IP. He said it seems no one wants the manufacturing plants IBM has. So those are still in the air.

 

[Unoid]

So the one chip that rivals or beats intel's may be viable for enthusiasts/devs for linux? that's not bad at all.

Unfortunatly that chip is like 600mm^2 and even if discounted would still be $1000.

Amazing cpu tough

 

[henriok]

Something tells me that IBM would NEVER allow that board to be allowed to be sold at retail. They wouldn't want system builders cannibalizing their System P sales, since they have BIG profit margins on them.

They also wouldn't want to deal with all of the AIX and Linux for POWER driver hassles when someone tries build their own system with IBM unsupported hardware.

Since IBM's point of founding OpenPOWER was to fuel proliferation of POWER8 related technologies, it would be counterproductive to allowing commoditization of such technologies.. And now that the cat's out of the bag, and the specs are freely available under the OpenPOWER licenses, IBM would be unable to do anything about it even if they wanted to.

IBM's business model isn't selling just hardware, but selling services and support of systems and if they can cover a larger ecosystem of hardware, I think they'll be very happy.

The OpenPOWER initiative will only cover little endian-Linux though, and not AIX, IBM i and regular Power Linux, so if you want to keep using those operating systems and related technologies like PowerVM, you'll pretty much still have to keep using IBM's Power Systems.

 

[ShintaiDK]

I doubt you gonna get IBM to service and maintain "random" hardware running "random" OS.

The only real interest in OpenPower that IBM seems to have, is to let more people share the development cost of the CPUs.

 

[henriok]

I doubt you gonna get IBM to service and maintain "random" hardware running "random" OS.

Then you don't know much about IBM. IBM Services are happily supporting just about anything. They'll support everything from iOS, Solaris on Sparc to Exchange on Dell hardware and Cisco networks. No problem. They'll even sell you such solutions if they can't make specific need happen on their own solution stack.

 

[meloz]

Power8 is open.

It is only open now because IBM knows it is a dead-end. So they are trying to sucker in other companies who might be foolish enough to finance some new R&D so that IBM can milk the platform for a few more years at other's expense.

 

[Idontcare]

Then you don't know much about IBM. IBM Services are happily supporting just about anything. They'll support everything from iOS, Solaris on Sparc to Exchange on Dell hardware and Cisco networks. No problem. They'll even sell you such solutions if they can't make specific need happen on their own solution stack.

That is very smart of IBM, sounds like an aggressive strategy.

 

[Ajay]

It is only open now because IBM knows it is a dead-end. So they are trying to sucker in other companies who might be foolish enough to finance some new R&D so that IBM can milk the platform for a few more years at other's expense.

And that's the cynical way to look at it. Point of note is that IBM and others will pursue this so long as they are able to make a profit - benefitting shareholders, employees and customers. So what if IBM profits the most, so long as others profit as well.

 

[Unoid]

Anyone wanna forecast the ability to buy a consumer/enthusiast Desktop motherboard with a Power 8 and run linux, and game on steam?

It's about as likely as the latest consoles using an APU, right?

 

[Essence_of_War]

Anyone wanna forecast the ability to buy a consumer/enthusiast Desktop motherboard with a Power 8 and run linux, and game on steam?

That may or may not have been close to what I was thinking...:sneaky:

 

[DrMrLordX]

That would be weird. It's cool that Sony and MS are able to take advantage of all those cores on a Jaguar for PS4/Xbox One, but would they (or anyone else) be able to utilize all of the compute resources on a full Power 8 chip? I would think a cut-down single-core Power8 at higher clock speeds would make more sense.

 

[jhu]

That would be weird. It's cool that Sony and MS are able to take advantage of all those cores on a Jaguar for PS4/Xbox One, but would they (or anyone else) be able to utilize all of the compute resources on a full Power 8 chip? I would think a cut-down single-core Power8 at higher clock speeds would make more sense.

There's no such thing as "too much computing power". For example ASCI Red was the first teraflops supercomputer back in 1997. We've had teraflops desktop computing since at least 2008 with AMD's Radeon HD 3870x2. And we've done nothing but gobble up all that computing power and ask for more.

 

[Unoid]

Can we ask IDC, or Anand, or some-one with some industry clout to send emails to tyan/IBM about the posibility of a Developer/Consumer ATX Power 8 board.

It really would rely on IBM selling smaller POWER8 chips at more reasonable prices, but it can be done. It'd be nice to get a more "official response"

I for one am giddy with excitement for the possibility. Even if when i load up Debian and steam and get 10fps lol

 

[Unoid]

That would be weird. It's cool that Sony and MS are able to take advantage of all those cores on a Jaguar for PS4/Xbox One, but would they (or anyone else) be able to utilize all of the compute resources on a full Power 8 chip? I would think a cut-down single-core Power8 at higher clock speeds would make more sense.

It would have been possible for IBM to make a 4core with xHT for effective 8-12-16 Cores at maybe 3ghz with it's multi channel 200+GB/s bandwdith memory in a 100watt package. However IBM has no integrate GPU. sadly.

 

[DrMrLordX]

There's no such thing as "too much computing power". For example ASCI Red was the first teraflops supercomputer back in 1997. We've had teraflops desktop computing since at least 2008 with AMD's Radeon HD 3870x2. And we've done nothing but gobble up all that computing power and ask for more.

It's not so much as having "too much computing power" as it is relying too heavily on thread parallelism for performance. Take a look at how many PC games fail to utilize more than four cores (and, in some cases, they still use only two). POWER8 handles up to 8 threads per core, and if I recall correctly, the smallest number of cores per CPU for POWER8 is . . . 6?

It would have been possible for IBM to make a 4core with xHT for effective 8-12-16 Cores at maybe 3ghz with it's multi channel 200+GB/s bandwdith memory in a 100watt package. However IBM has no integrate GPU. sadly.

IBM rolled out their CAPI interface which - like HT and QPI - should allow other devices to share memory space with the CPU. A GPU linked up via CAPI could work out okay. But would the machine even need more than one POWER8 core?

 

[NostaSeronx]

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/scale-out.html
^-- prices for POWER8 and POWER7+ systems.

 

[ShintaiDK]

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/scale-out.html
^-- prices for POWER8 and POWER7+ systems.

Pretty much shows one of the reasons why POWER is dead.

 

[Essence_of_War]

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/scale-out.html
^-- prices for POWER8 and POWER7+ systems.

Yuck

Here's to hoping the Tyan dev board is more reasonably priced.

 

[zarcondg]

It would have been possible for IBM to make a 4core with xHT for effective 8-12-16 Cores at maybe 3ghz with it's multi channel 200+GB/s bandwdith memory in a 100watt package. However IBM has no integrate GPU. sadly.

wow. Some of us use the CPU, and don't want that graphics junk sucking up resources. It's the reason I'm now looking at IBM instead of the other options. There are places and times a real dedicated GPU with it's own dedicated memory really is better then any APU. :whiste:

 

[jhu]

Pretty much shows one of the reasons why POWER is dead.

Given the cost of software licenses and support contracts, the hardware cost is just a drop in the bucket.

 

[Essence_of_War]

I mean, high cost of entry does kill the commodity market.

Enterprise usage probably depends just on perf/watt and perf/m^2 of floor space, though.

 

[NTMBK]

wow. Some of us use the CPU, and don't want that graphics junk sucking up resources. It's the reason I'm now looking at IBM instead of the other options. There are places and times a real dedicated GPU with it's own dedicated memory really is better then any APU. :whiste:

Wow. What utter rot. There are dozens of models of x86 CPUs available without a GPU attached- almost the entire Xeon and Opteron lines.