Re:IBM Adds POWER9 AIO, Pushes for an Open Memory-Agnostic I...
by nullc on Monday November 04, 2019 @01:45PM
(#21444912)
Indeed, there is a realm of astronomical hardware that is covered by power9 that you're not finding amd hardware for, but going down to "merely the price of a new car" and below is where the comparison falls apart.
And the astronomical end really only matters if you need special requirements like single system images... if you just need lots of cycles or memory bandwidth, a cluster of lower end hosts (and 40GBE nics) is a lot less pricey.
> a POWER9 that could compete with low-end Xeon servers.
The Talos II is in the vague order of magnitude for that... which is A LOT better than before it existed.
Re:IBM Adds POWER9 AIO, Pushes for an Open Memory-Agnostic I...
by rbanffy on Monday November 04, 2019 @01:59PM
(#21445070)
True, but it's still, sadly, above my impulse-buy limit.
To make things a bit harder, I live in Europe and there aren't as many sources of used POWER8+ gear as there are in North America.
Worth noting POWER9 reaches price points (and profit margins) EPYC server vendors can only dream of.
Sadly, you are right about onboarding. I'd love to have a POWER9 box as my desktop workstation, but I simply can't justify the price compared to a beefy Xeon (or EPYC) box. IBM would be wise to have a POWER9 that could compete with low-end Xeon servers.