Next-Generation IBM POWER10 Processor

Re:Next-Generation IBM POWER10 Processor by twoodfin on Monday August 17, 2020 @11:07AM (#24187984)

Note that 8-way SMT is the "big core", and I'm almost convinced that 8-SMT is more about licensing than actually scaling. By supporting 8 threads per core (and doubling the size of the core), you get a 30-core system that supports 240-threads. That's a licensing hack: since most enterprise software is paid per-core.

I don't think that's entirely fair: Massively multi-user transactional applications (read: databases) are right in the wheelhouse of POWER, and they're exactly the kind of applications that benefit most from SMT. Lots of opportunities for latency hiding as you're chasing pointers from indexes to data blocks.

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Re:Next-Generation IBM POWER10 Processor by dragontamer on Monday August 17, 2020 @11:16AM (#24188064)

While that's a fair point, databases are also among the most costly software that is paid per-core. So the SMT8 system will have half the per-core costs as an SMT4 system (because an SMT8 system will have half the "cores" of any SMT4 system. Even though an SMT8 core is just two SMT4 cores grafted together).

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