Hacker News Reader

Comment by floatboth | Hacker News Reader

> the Torvalds argument

Well, the local machines are coming, it's totally feasible to have a Blackbird at home and host at IntegriCloud…

but both of those are really expensive, so instead I have a MACCHIATObin at home & AWS Graviton in the cloud. ARM is winning :P

> optimizing compiler, code and so on

Fun fact, IBM is paying large amounts of cash on BountySource for SIMD optimizations of various things for POWER: https://www.bountysource.com/teams/ibm

But ARM is winning again: many things, especially the more user-facing ones, are already optimized thanks to smartphones. For POWER, the TenFourFox author is I think still working on SpiderMonkey's baseline JIT. For ARM (AArch64), IonMonkey (full smart JIT) is already enabled, developed by Mozilla, thanks to both Android phones and the new Windows-Qualcomm laptops: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1536220

View on HN

> Well, the local machines are coming, it's totally feasible to have a Blackbird at home and host at IntegriCloud…

Yeah but there's a HUGE but: the motherboard and CPU (1S/4C/16T) and heatsink alone are $1.4k, no RAM no case no HD no nothing (I found a guy who spec'ed one for $2.1k with everything you'd need for a reasonable workstation). So unless you have a massive good reason or interest (political, because POWER, your company runs on POWER, "f*ck" x86, ...) to run your code on POWER, I don't see why you'd spend that much while you could get better for a lot less.

And the only way it'll get cheaper is to mass produce it: let's be realistic, as much as I'd want to have a POWER workstation or laptop (hey, there were SPARC and Thinkpad PowerPC laptops so why not), I won't be holding my breath while I wait...

Yeah, I already mentioned that because of that price, my "fuck x86" machine is ARMv8 :)

(okay, not only because of the price, also because I just like the A64 ISA and UEFI)

The SolidRun MACCHIATObin is not nearly as powerful — it's ultrabook-grade performance, not server-grade — but it works fine for coding & browsing, and it's also quite open — the only blob in the firmware is something tiny and irrelevant (and I'm pretty sure for some secondary processor), everything on the ARM cores post-ROM (including RAM training code) I have built from source.

That's more expensive than an x86 equivalent system, but hardly outrageously more so.

Well, the CPUs are in the same ballpark (<500 bucks for the 4-core POWER9 ~= launch price of the Ryzen 7 1800X) but the boards are outrageous — $1100 for the Blackbird is almost twice as expensive as ridiculous E X T R E M E boards like the ASUS ROG ZENITH EXTREME for Threadripper (and a normal decent board for desktop Ryzen is in the $250 area).

Yeah, it's low volume and Raptor needs to pay their employees — but $1100 for a mainboard? Come on. Maybe they should have dropped PCIe Gen 4 from the Blackbird at least.

> outrageous... ridiculous...

Enough people are buying, which means the price is just right (Capitalism 101).

Enough to not bankrupt Raptor just now, but not enough to make POWER actually popular, which would provide them much more customers in the future.

I think you are overlooking one of the main reasons for avoiding Intel and AMD -- the ME and PSP, respectively. Intel or AMD has a master "skeleton" key that can basically unlock any of their computers post-sale, while simultaneously using that key to ensure that you cannot modify, replace, or remove the black box firmware in question.

If you trust Intel and AMD, without an SLA, to keep your data private all I'll say is that's quite naive. Even the HDMI master key leaked, do you really expect the ME and PSP signing keys not to fall into the wrong hands at any point?

Yes, the mainboards are expensive. That's the price of making them blob-free and still retaining high performance. Blackbird lowers that barrier to entry some as well.

Again, Rome has a mandatory PSP blob that cannot be removed (any UEFI toggles that say otherwise are not accurate -- the PSP must run before the x86 cores even come out of reset). If you're OK with that loss of control, my gut impression is that use of Linux etc. is just being done to avoid Microsoft licensing fees, not because of security or owner control concerns ;). At that point, why not just lease cloud space on a major provider that can offer that compute power even cheaper than a local machine which sits idle overnight?

I know you like to play up the privacy angle in your marketing… that wouldn't work on me. I mostly work on public/FOSS stuff, about the only really private data on my PC is my access credentials. I don't want them stolen, but someone targeting me with a low-level exploit for them is a ridiculous moonshot scenario, they're a million times more likely to leak from the actual service itself.

> local machine which sits idle overnight

um, I thought we're talking about workstations here. I power mine off when unused.

> use of Linux etc. is just being done to avoid Microsoft licensing fees, not because of security or owner control concerns

This is based on two rather odd assumptions:

- Microsoft as the default: No, I grew up with Unix, Unix is my default choice just because I know it and I'm used to it;

- owner control on all levels being equally important: meh, there's a lot more that you'd want to tweak in the kernel and up the stack. I wouldn't know what to change in firmware. I have changed many little things in the FreeBSD kernel (and contributed them). The only thing I ever changed in the UEFI firmware on my ARM box is some ACPI tables to fix compatibility.

> That's the price of making them blob-free and still retaining high performance

That sounds vague ;)

Also, what's "high performance" about the board anyway? PCIe Gen 4? On a typical developer workstation that's kind of a waste, Gen 3 is plenty.

While the machines off it is a paid for resource that is unused. A cloud provider would lease that resource (so to speak) to someone else during that time, meaning in theory they can provide lower cost than you will ever see unless you can somehow get the hardware cheaper than they can.

Good providers will still allow you to run an accelerated VM inside the leased VPS, so you could still do your kernel hacking there.

I'm simply saying there's something interesting here -- you care enough about owning (I use that term loosely) a machine to spend more on a local system, but not enough to obtain one that you can freely modify as desired. Clearly there is a threshold, and I'm curious where it lies. :)

The threshold is not spending all my savings on an additional computer "for science" :)

> accelerated VM inside the leased VPS

Does that work on POWER?

> they can provide lower cost

They can but they won't. They like having huge profits. Even if they offer the base VPS for cheap (Spot instances) they rip you off on storage, bandwidth, IP addresses, etc.

Also, again, desktops. I like developing directly on a desktop workstation. I can't exactly insert my Radeon into a PCIe slot in the cloud and run a DisplayPort cable from the cloud to my monitor :)

Yeah, POWER has basically unlimited nested virt from POWER9 on. And unlike x86 you don't get the massive slowdowns past a level or two of nested virtualization.

Stadia seems to think it can push a high resolution monitor like stream over a network interface. I'm playing devils advocate of course here but fundamentally if you don't have control of the hardware there's no long term advantage to local compute, at least not with current market trends etc. Everything points to a move back to dumb terminals for consumer use at this point -- in the past it would have at least been possible to hack those terminals to run some minimal (for the time) OS, but crypto locking of the terminal hardware stops that quite cold.

Yeah, I'm still working on it. But I'm just one guy. Hopefully this gains interest from others in working on it too (and I will _not_ be butthurt if someone gets a fully functional one submitted before I do -- in fact, I'll probably be relieved).

https://github.com/classilla/jitpower

POWER9 only supports 128-bit vectors, which is a big disadvantage.

Yeah, Intel is ahead of everyone in SIMD width (until someone makes a chip with like 2048-bit ARM SVE :D).

But still, that didn't prevent POWER9 from being in one of the largest supercomputers. And super wide SIMD has its disadvantages (hello AVX Offset downclocking)

You have a point but then Intel has been crushing it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Processor_families_in_TOP...

They have cornered at least 85% of that market...

And most likely, it's the nVidia connection with NVLink which matters most in there if we talk about SIMD...

They said it better than I could (in June of 2018): https://www.top500.org/news/new-gpu-accelerated-supercompute...

In the latest TOP500 rankings announced this week, 56 percent of the additional flops were a result of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs running in new supercomputers – that according to the Nvidians, who enjoy keeping track of such things. In this case, most of those additional flops came from three top systems new to the list: Summit, Sierra, and the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI).

Summit, the new TOP500 champ, pushed the previous number one system, the 93-petaflop Sunway TaihuLight, into second place with a Linpack score of 122.3 petaflops. Summit is powered by IBM servers, each one equipped with two Power9 CPUs and six V100 GPUs. According to NVIDIA, 95 percent of the Summit’s peak performance (187.7 petaflops) is derived from the system’s 27,686 GPUs. (emphasis mine, Summit being a POWER9 supercomputer with 4608 nodes with 2 POWER9 and 6 V100 in each)

I think that's more reflective of Intel cornering at least 85% of virtually every market (except, notoriously, mobile) than of some special suitability for HPC.

I agree, I was just saying all traditional supercomputer manufacturers lost that battle, including POWER but it's the last standing member from the old guard...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com