IBM Adds POWER9 AIO, Pushes for an Open Memory-Agnostic Interface

Re:IBM Adds POWER9 AIO, Pushes for an Open Memory-Agnostic I... by rasz on Monday November 04, 2019 @01:35PM (#21444791)

How much are the accelerators? something tells me more expensive than delivering comparable throughput, highly flexible off the shelf x86 hardware.

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Re:IBM Adds POWER9 AIO, Pushes for an Open Memory-Agnostic I... by baybal2 on Monday November 04, 2019 @01:59PM (#21445075)

Back in 2013, Intel 8920 did cost $750 wholesale, and similar Broadcom card a little bit cheaper.

Looks a lot now, but back then you didn't have server CPUs with gazillion cores on the cheap.

It was also about getting more bandwidth to a single server. 20Gb/s was a practical limit per mainstream server, but with accelerators you could've multiplied it many times more than the fastest CPU on the market.

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Re:IBM Adds POWER9 AIO, Pushes for an Open Memory-Agnostic I... by snark42 on Monday November 04, 2019 @02:20PM (#21445329)

> Looks a lot now, but back then you didn't have server CPUs with gazillion cores on the cheap.

You also didn't have the AES instruction set to improve the SSL performance.

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Re:IBM Adds POWER9 AIO, Pushes for an Open Memory-Agnostic I... by Unklejoe on Monday November 04, 2019 @01:52PM (#21444994)

You're also not tied to any particular vendor with a pure software approach.

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Re:IBM Adds POWER9 AIO, Pushes for an Open Memory-Agnostic I... by wmf on Monday November 04, 2019 @03:03PM (#21445841)

Realistically with something well-defined like TLS you use a library that supports pure software or hardware acceleration. Then you can use acceleration without any lock-in.

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