Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Little Endian

Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by rdtsc on Thursday July 21, 2016 @10:44PM (#12141419)

> Once all threads are active, the IBM POWER8 core is able to outperform the Intel CPU by 41% (geomean average).

Nice! I see good multi-threaded performance. Can use regular memory in it as well. Also someone mentioned already I see but I understand POWER8 doesn't come with something equivalent to Intel Management (ME) -- the friendly backdoor inside your server <insert Intel Inside joke here>

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Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by edwintorok on Friday July 22, 2016 @03:16AM (#12142190)

Yes, that is why for the Talos workstation Power8 was chosen: https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease_specs.php

"POWER is the only open, owner-controllable architecture that is competitive in performance."

If you are interested in using anything other than Intel ME/AMD PSP "backdoored" desktop, please register your interest, they will only build Talos if enough people want to order it.

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Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by creshal on Friday July 22, 2016 @07:36AM (#12142946)

I would be interested, but even their minimal configuration is overkill for me. If there's a 50-70W quadcore option, sign me up.

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Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by SixSigma on Friday July 22, 2016 @06:57AM (#12142814)

For anyone not familiar with ME, it has been around for a long time. It used to live on network cards and then migrated to the motherboard.

http://www.slideshare.net/codeblue_jp/igor-skochinsky-enpub

It has a built-in Java VM !

And a web server, controllable by HTTP and SOAP sitting on top

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Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by wmf on Friday July 22, 2016 @12:50AM (#12141760)

It has a BMC and On-Chip Controller (OCC), but the firmware for both is open source.

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Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by ashitlerferad on Friday July 22, 2016 @02:28AM (#12142035)

Got a link for those?

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Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by edwintorok on Friday July 22, 2016 @03:23AM (#12142214)

There will be a talk about the (Open)BMC firmware: https://lcccna2016.sched.org/event/7JWX/openbmc-a-new-secure...

Edit: remove dup links

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Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by ajdlinux on Friday July 22, 2016 @05:28AM (#12142554)

Talk at linux.conf.au 2016 on the broader view of the OpenPOWER firmware stack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4XGvssR-ag

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Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by yuhong on Thursday July 21, 2016 @10:57PM (#12141459)

I think most of them have things like IPMI already anyway and admins often uses them.

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