For those who came in late, the OpenPower Foundation community something which was set up to rival x86-based servers. Biggish Blue is a key player in the community.
IBM’s new RISC-based Power8 chip is designed for artificial intelligence, analytics, and deep learning workloads and will go into the Power Systems family of Linux servers.
It is fabricated using IBM’s 22-nm Silicon on Insulator (SOI) technology with layers of metal, and it has been designed to significantly improve both single-thread performance and single-core throughput over its predecessor, the POWER7i processor.
The POWER8 processor claims to have a much improved core and nest microarchitecture to achieve approximately one-and-a-half times the single-thread performance and twice the single-core throughput of the POWER7 processor in several commercial applications. Combined with a 50 percent increase in the number of cores (from 8 in the POWER7 processor to 12 in the POWER8 processor).
The result is a processor that leads the industry in performance for enterprise workloads. This talk will describe the architecture and microarchitecture innovations made in the POWER8 processor that resulted in these significant performance benefits for cloud applications, workload optimization features for stream processing, analytics and big data workloads, and support for organic workload growth.
Top of the server range is Big Blue's Power S822LC for High Performance Computing along with the Power8 processor the service comes with Nvidia's Tesla P100 Pascal GPUs. The system also has Nvidia's NVLink processor that allows for high-speed bidirectional interconnects. IBM loves to combine its Power8 gear with that of Nvidia. Biggish Blue claims it allows data to flow five times faster than an x86-based system.
The Power S822LC has been tested by the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The ORNL systems will be a test-bed to develop applications for its Summit, an IBM-built supercomputer being delivered in 2017.
In addition to the Power S822LC are the Power S821LC and the Power S822LC for big data. These systems have tight Nvidia integration as well as high-speed interconnects.
The Power S822LC will ship on the 26th of September.
