I'm glad they are finally doing this, not so much because I care about what happens in the server world, but because so many product chip decisions at Google have been political (by choosing Intel chips) simply because Otellini was on their board. Hopefully this will signal a change from that.
Well, the Power architecture had some success in Apple products, but ended with the inability of IBM to scale production and produce parts that consumed less power
Power8 has 230GB/s of bandwidth to ram compared to a Xeon's 85GB/s. That's nearly triple (270.5%) a XEON's I/O speed.
Further, a benchmark like this is complicated. How is RAM divided between sockets? What's the bandiwdth between a CPU and memory in another socket? etc etc
But I'll respond anyways. It looks like you have GB and Gb per second confused. One is 8x the other.
admin-magazine: claims 120Gb/s [1]
intel claims: 246Gb/s [2]
Independent claims on intel forums range from 120-175Gb/s [3]
Intel's cut sheet for their own latest generation xeon states it only supports 25GB/s (200Gb/s) memory bandwidth [4]
[1] http://www.admin-magazine.com/HPC/Articles/Finding-Memory-Bo...
[2] http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/benchmarks/server/xeo...
[3] https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/topic/383121
[4] http://ark.intel.com/products/75465/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-...
The page you cite here: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/benchmarks/server/xeo...
shows a triad bandwidth (STREAM) of 246,313.60 MB (megabytes) per second which is 240 GB (gigaBYTES) / sec.
If I'm making a mistake I'm sure we can work it out.
That is indeed impressive. no wonder google is considering these. memory bandwidth is indeed critical.
All: please don't use snark in HN comments. It violates civility and degrades the discourse.
Notice that I actually had a question and it was answered in the thread, which I acknowledged.
I could well be hyperallergic after years of wincing at gratuitous unpleasantness in HN comments (edit: and, to be fair, having contributed my own share of it). In person, of course, tone of voice would reveal everything about "ummm...".
Either way, please understand that the intent behind comments like this is in no way personal. The idea is to send feedback signals into the community about the kind of discourse we want to cultivate.
EDIT: Digging a little more gave me the answer: "The POWERn family of processors were developed in the late 1980s and are still in active development nearly 25 years later. In the beginning, they utilized the POWER instruction set architecture (ISA), but that evolved into PowerPC in later generations and then to Power Architecture. Today, only the naming scheme remains the same; modern POWER processors do not use the POWER ISA."
Gives a nice visual presentation of what happened.
They've also formed a consortium to promote this processor, of which Google is a flagship member (http://openpowerfoundation.org/). The expectation (or hope, or fear, depending on your point of view) is that Google may be designing their future server infrastructure around this chip. This motherboard is some of the first concrete evidence of this.
The chip is exciting to a lot of people not just because it offer competition to Intel, but because it's the first potentially strong competitor to x86/x64 to appear in the server market for quite a while. By the specs, it's really quite a powerhouse: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/181102-ibm-power8-openp...