Eat it AMD and Intel: IBM's Power 8 CPU

As per the name of this forum, this is for CPU discussion. What are you discussing, exactly?

thideras said:

As per the name of this forum, this is for CPU discussion. What are you discussing, exactly?

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A POWER8 chip has 12 cores and 96 MB eDRAM L3 cache, 8 MB per core. The chip can also utilize an up to 128 MB off-chip eDRAM L4 cache using Centaur companion chips. The on-chip memory controllers can handle 1 TB RAM and 230 GB/s sustained memory bandwidth. The on-board PCI Express controllers can handle 48 GB/s of I/O to other parts of the system.

The POWER8 core has 64 KB L1 data and 32 KB L1 instruction caches, and 512 KB SRAM L2 cache on a 64-byte (512 bits) wide bus, twice as wide as its predecessor -- I believe x86 CPU's only have a 128-bit wide cache bus.

POWER8 is designed to be a massively multithreaded chip, capable of handling 96 hardware threads simultaneously. Each core is eight-way hardware multithreaded and can be dynamically and automatically partitioned to have either one, two, four or all eight threads active

Centaur

The memory controllers on the POWER8 chips is specified to use either DDR3 or DDR4 bus are designed to be future proof by being a generic memory controller with an external component called Centaur that will act as a memory buffer, L4 cache chip and actual memory controller. The current Centaur chip is using DDR3 memory but a future version can use DDR4 without need to swap the POWER8 chip itself.

The link between the POWER8 chip and the Centaur is a 9.6 GB/s with 40 ns latency. It contains 16 MB of eDRAM which can be used as L4 cache by the processor. Each POWER8 can be linked to up to eight Centaur chips for an aggregated 128 MB L4 cache and 230 GB/s sustained and 410 GB/s peak memory bandwidth in and out of the processor.[1]

The Centaur chips are fabricated on a similar process as the POWER8.

It also runs at 4 Ghz.

There's not much to discuss as to which manufacturer has the most powerful CPU on earth right now.

Granted it's a great processor, but only available in a $40,000 server platform

You can start your own business instead of buying bragging rights for one year or two.

I wonder if Apple regrets going to x86 now? At least Apple used to have bragging rights as to having more powerful processors when they used PowerPC based Macs.

No, because they have the compatibility to run Windows. Smartest move they have made.

^Yep, I was working for Apple at the time they made the switch to Intel (January 2006). And I can guarantee you sales made a huge increase.

Since Apple has gone w/x86 though, what really makes their hardware any different from PC's? What it all boils down to is that Apple isn't selling an alternative system anymore, but merely an OS.

At work we are in the process of upgrading from a couple P595s to a couple P770s and a P740. Should have held off and gotten an P8 series instead... the $3MM we spent is already a generation old.

The only real difference in Apple PCs and Windows PCs is the OS and chassis/case.

pcgamer4life said:

At work we are in the process of upgrading from a couple P595s to a couple P770s and a P740. Should have held off and gotten an P8 series instead... the $3MM we spent is already a generation old.

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Are the P595's the 5GHz variants? What applications do you run on these systems?

magellan said:

Are the P595's the 5GHz variants? What applications do you run on these systems?

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No, they're 1.6ghz I believe. We use them for ETL jobs (Datastage), analytics (mostly SAS and sql), hosting a 25TB+ Oracle Database, among a few other light weight applications.

pcgamer4life said:

No, they're 1.6ghz I believe. We use them for ETL jobs (Datastage), analytics (mostly SAS and sql), hosting a 25TB+ Oracle Database, among a few other light weight applications.

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25TIB, that's nothing to sneeze at. How much memory do you have installed on that system?

I think if apple still were RISC based PPC's like the days of yor we'd still be having the arguments that macs would be good at content creation in the multimedia sector but sucked at life.

it'd be like the computer that took 6 years to get an art degree, sounds cool, makes cool things, isn't getting any place fast in life...

Niku-Sama said:

I think if apple still were RISC based PPC's like the days of yor we'd still be having the arguments that macs would be good at content creation in the multimedia sector but sucked at life.

it'd be like the computer that took 6 years to get an art degree, sounds cool, makes cool things, isn't getting any place fast in life...

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I'm willing to bet a Mac based on a Power7+ or a Power8 would be a lot better than any box using any x86 CPU at more than just "content creation in the multimedia sector".

magellan said:

25TIB, that's nothing to sneeze at. How much memory do you have installed on that system?

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Not very much, between 12 and 48 gig per LPAR (only 5 total). The frames are full of RAM and CPU, but we don't have them all active.

magellan said:

I'm willing to bet a Mac based on a Power7+ or a Power8 would be a lot better than any box using any x86 CPU at more than just "content creation in the multimedia sector".

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That's possible, if developers spent the time coding for a non-x86 architecture

Janus67 said:

That's possible, if developers spent the time coding for a non-x86 architecture

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I'd imagine it's no more difficult than developing apps for OS X. After all, OS X started out on the PowerPC. IBM's xlc compilers are excellent and support both Linux and AIX.

This has got to be the dumbest thread ever. Do you think you can just throw these cpu's in a consumer box? A laptop? IBM could not make a powerpc processor that thermally or battery life wise could even be used in a laptop. That is why Apple ditched the ppc platform. And Mac sales skyrocketed after the switch. It made the Mac way more versatile.