Not any worse than the past decade of arm server "promise"
Bootstrapping an alt arch is hard, it really needs a loss leader OR a significant performance delta (which they now have with accelerator workloads). Google deploying it in prod is a major milestone and will help with volume and confidence.
Supermicro has a P8 and P9 line. It is price competitive with x86. If you are interested, send their sales a note.
Come on, you can buy a load of ARM 64 bit development boards starting from just a few tens of dollars. There is no problem at all getting access to ARM. And from there you can scale up to Cavium 2 or Amberwing which have Xeon-like performance (better than Xeon in some ways). If there's a problem with ARM I'd say it's still the lack of standardization, and also very few mid-range servers.
POWER is nothing like this. There are no development boards at all, for anything less than $thousands, and the real servers have great performance but sky-high prices.
You can't actually buy TX2. I don't know about market availability of Amberwing either (if you know please let me know). There is an abundance of arm stuff in the embedded space where it is king, and it's true you can pick them up for next to nothing but somewhat orthogonal to servers (flattened device trees vs ACPI/UEFI etc)
You can web buy an S821LC straight from IBM for $5k for the past couple years. The AC922 is GA. Supermicro will sell you a P8 right now and P9 in May for nominal prices and the CPUs are cheaper than Skylake by a very wide margin.
Not directly related to your comment but I get the feeling a lot of people complaining about price are navel gazing and have no idea how much a production server costs and how the costs break down. Right now storage is generally 50+% of the cost. DRAM is a very high fixed cost at the moment as well. Intel flatted the quad socket SKUs into the "Scalable Series" so Skylake represents a big price increase for a lot of builders. To help re-calibrate people, IBM doesn't have $6-12k CPUs in the dual socket config but Intel does at bins people would want for common workloads.
> Not directly related to your comment but I get the feeling a lot of people complaining about price are navel gazing and have no idea how much a production server costs and how the costs break down.
They're not asking for production servers.
$5k for a workstation, for a minority architecture, is basically a fancy way of saying "no" to the army of tinkerers you need to widen the base.
I have my own Cavium rep. Show me a real CPU, board and worthwhile sheet metal (i.e 10+ nvme) I can buy in volume because you might know something he doesn't and I'd be happy to eval it.
"At STH we are working with Gigabyte and Cavium and will share more about the ThunderX2 architecture as we are given the go-ahead. We have heard the next production run is in the Q2 2018 timeframe."
This has been my experience with cavium, bait and switch slideware and when you do finally get a sample it has so far been undesirable (octeon, TX1)
They are still useful though. If you want to build an 7-node cluster of 2GB nodes on a single Mini ITX motherboard, it's even cheap. And requires no messy cables.
That's neat. I had heard of the PINE64 board but never the SOPINE. Curious, have you implemented any projects on this? Seems like it might be neat for testing a small distributed system.
Those SBCs are still stuck with using very outdated SoCs usually with a quadcore A53. Even a 7 node cluster of SOPINEs is going to be slower than an iPhone X.
But it is worse. Over 12 million Ras Pis have been sold, I see them just lying around on developer's desks all the time.
I don't think I've ever even seen a bootable Power system.
That pretty much tells the story. A single, last man standing vendor like IBM with a business model of making money on Mainframe/“Midrange”/Old-School Unix boxes will never, ever be Intel. POWER is cool, but who cares.
It’s more productive to think about how to harness lots of cheap ARM cores if intel isn’t doing it for you.
My employer has a few. It’s fast and looks impressive. But when you cut away the bullshit, it mostly exists because the sales guy presented a story where the cost of a new POWER box is a better deal than maintenance on the old one.
If you really dig into it, there’s no scenario other than a license play where a transition to Intel isn’t more cost effective. Even in those scenarios, you can usually engineer a solution (Oracle, etc) where you deliver a better ROI on commodity hardware or cloud hardware.
The local UUG I was a part of had one available through the IBM innovation center. You were able to schedule time on it to experiment. Even with that close access it seemed like a PITA.
I will concede one point: it was not easy to purchase. I prefer to host my personal site on Power hardware; I started with AIX in the 3.2.5 days and I ran Floodgap on an Apple Network Server 500 for the better part of 14 years. I wanted to get a POWER7 to replace it in 2010, I budgeted $15k for it, and IBM wouldn't take my money. I couldn't find _any_ IBM VAR who would do an end-user sale because I wasn't going to buy the service contract.
Eventually I found a reseller who was more than happy to take $10K of my budget for a decent 2-year-old POWER6. It had a backplane burp a couple years ago but otherwise has been pretty damn spiffy.
I'll concede IBM has to do a lot more to get these systems into people's hands to achieve a critical mass and it certainly wouldn't hurt to make them cheaper up to a point, but the systems are out there, and you can get them (and find them).
As a postscript, in my current job (a large local government agency) I was in the CIO's office one day and the regional IBM salesdroid dropped by. Just to needle him I told him this story and he gave me his card and told him to call him with any parts requests, any time. I still buy from the reseller, though. They've earned my personal business.
Even in your example, the barrier or entry is still so high — I can buy a very nice new x86 machine for $10k, instead of a 2 year old POWER system. I am interested in the POWER architecture, but not buy $10k worth of old hardware interested.
Bootstrapping an alt arch is hard, it really needs a loss leader OR a significant performance delta (which they now have with accelerator workloads). Google deploying it in prod is a major milestone and will help with volume and confidence.
Supermicro has a P8 and P9 line. It is price competitive with x86. If you are interested, send their sales a note.