Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

So Presumably, Google will manufacture their own POWER8 CPU. But Who made them? TSMC? GloFo? Not IBM since IBM will be exiting Fab business in the near future.

I am going to guess this Dual CPU variant will be aiming at Intel Xeon E5 v2 Series. The 10 - 12 Core version cost from anywhere between $1200 - $2600. Although Google do get huge discount for buying directly from Intel and their volume.

Assuming the cost to made each 12 Core POWER8 to be $200, that is a potentially cost saving of $1000 per CPU, and $2000 per Server.

The last estimate were around 1 - 1.5 Million Servers at google in 2012 and 2M+ in 2013. May be they are approaching 3M in 2014/15. Even with most of those are low power CPU for storage or other needs. One million CPU made themselves could be savings of up to a billion.

Could this, kick start the server and Enterprise Industry to buy POWER8 CPU at much cheaper price? And Once there are enough momentum and software optimization ( JVM ) it could filter down to Web Hosting industry as well.

In the best case scenario, this means big trouble for Intel.

In the link here they estimate the price for a single power8 cpu at $5000, based on real server price.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/181102-ibm-power8-openp...

That may be list price and keep in mind that a similar Xeon costs around $4,600.

This could also mean big trouble for AMD since they're pushing high-density ARM64 in the data center, one could even go so far as assume that Google isn't taking AMD seriously.

This POWER8 board has been in development for a long time and will only be used if it turns out to be cheaper then the Intel/AMD alternatives.

The platforms team at Google is also developing an ARM solution. They have GPU's in testing as well.

There is also the distinct possibility that they would use both. The best hardware for processing search queries is not necessarily the best hardware for hosting map tiles, etc.

What would be the point for Google to build their own CPU? How would it be different from what IBM has to offer?

The parent poster is referring to IBM leaving the cpu fab business, so of course a Google produced CPU (most likely farmed out to a fab) is better than a ghost cpu produced by a shut down factory by non-existent fab technicians/engineers.

Realistically, you don't shut down a multi-billion-dollar state-of-the-art fab. It may be sold to another company but it will continue to operate.

Is it confirmed IBM will stop chip fab?

No.

AMD has also been fabless for a while. Somehow the chips keep showing up...

Another possibility, with the power being open and having a market in servers is easic which offers chip manufacturing technology that is fit for lower volumes, with easier customizability option, to offer a customizable server processor.

In the places this fits, it could offer substantial improvement. for example 10-100x performance/cost+power for in-memory cache servers.

And they're working on making this tech programmable while still keeping this same cost levels.

And all this in the context of moore's law grinding to a halt. So definetly ,intel will have a hard time ahead.

EDIT: it appears that the power8 support an open extension interface to other chips(CAPI). Which means will see such accelerators sooner than later.

Do you mean ASIC for the coprocessors, or for customizing the main design? The latter isn't strictly impossible, but it'd be a pretty major undertaking to take the POWER8 design and put it on an ASIC. The reference design, at least, is intended for a 22nm SOI process, and it's not a trivial port to put it on something else.

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