Next-Generation IBM POWER10 Processor

Re:Next-Generation IBM POWER10 Processor by devy on Monday August 17, 2020 @10:56AM (#24187894)

Yeah, I had the same thought. Also gzip has been around for many decades and newer lossless compression algorithms are way better both in terms of speed (comparing with the same hardware) and compression ratio, e.g. LZ4 algorithm and Zstandard.

It just doesn't make sense for the HW engineers and chip designers to optimize backwards for older software algorithm instead of optimizing forward for newer algorithms.

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Re:Next-Generation IBM POWER10 Processor by tephra on Monday August 17, 2020 @11:25AM (#24188144)

This depends on the prevalence on the different algorithms. If let's say gzip is 90% of the decompression load then it would make good sense.

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Re:Next-Generation IBM POWER10 Processor by chungus_khan on Monday August 17, 2020 @12:02PM (#24188481)

One such extremely common workload that does frequent gzip compression is HTTP servers because it is the standard method for compression.

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Re:Next-Generation IBM POWER10 Processor by giantrobot on Monday August 17, 2020 @06:05PM (#24192764)

GZip is a widely supported compression type for HTTP connections. It makes complete sense to have it be hardware accelerated.

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Re:Next-Generation IBM POWER10 Processor by jiggawatts on Monday August 17, 2020 @11:23PM (#24194935)

Zstandard is not actually that fast!

I recently benchmarked it versus the ancient "DEFLATE" algorithm, as seen in the .NET Framework.

They're virtually identical in speed using typical settings.

Zstandard only has a performance advantage if using the prepared dictionaries, in which case it is genuinely faster.

If you don't go to the effort of "training" a dictionary and using it, there's zero benefit to Zstandard.

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Re:Next-Generation IBM POWER10 Processor by posix_me_less on Monday August 17, 2020 @11:39AM (#24188255)

IBM tech is for large old heavy-footed enterprises. I expect much GZIP, less Zstandard there.

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Re:Next-Generation IBM POWER10 Processor by myself248 on Monday August 17, 2020 @01:05PM (#24189183)

How specific are those "gzip instructions", though? Are there newer algorithms that could benefit from some of the same acceleration primitives, even if they do higher-level things differently?

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Re:Next-Generation IBM POWER10 Processor by wmf on Monday August 17, 2020 @02:55PM (#24190539)

They're not instructions; it's a dedicated hardware unit. Most of the area appears to be devoted to finding matches so it should be possible to add other LZ-style algorithms without much additional area.

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