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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday December 10 2017, @02:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the 9-of-9 dept.

IBM Announces 'Game-Changing' Power9 Servers For AI

IBM has announced its Power Systems Servers, which will be the first to sport the new Power9 processor, a chip that has been in development for four years.

The computing giant built the processor for compute-intensive AI workloads, and it claims the Power9 systems will have the ability to improve the training times of deep learning frameworks by nearly 4x. As a result, companies will be able to make more accurate AI applications in a faster manner.

The Power9-based AC922 Power Systems will be the world's first to embed PCI-Express 4.0, next-generation Nvidia NVLink, and OpenCAPI--which IBM says that, when combined, can accelerate data movement, calculated at a rate that's 9.5x faster than PCI-E 3.0 based x86 systems.

Also at HPCwire:

A lot is riding on the success of Power9 after Power8 failed to generate the kind of profits that IBM had hoped for. There was growth in Power8's first year, said King, but after that sales tailed off. He added that capabilities like Nutanix and building PowerAI and other software based solutions on top of it have led to a bit of a rebound. "It's still negative but it's low negative," he said, "but it's sequentially grown quarter to quarter in the last three quarters, since Bob Picciano [SVP of IBM Cognitive Systems] came on."

Several IBM reps we spoke with acknowledged that pricing – or at least pricing perception – was a problem for Power8. "For our traditional market I think pricing was competitive; for some of the new markets that we're trying to get into, like the hyperscaler datacenters, I think we've got some work to do," said King. "It's really a TCO and a price-performance competitiveness versus price only. And we think we're going to have a much better price performance competitiveness with Power9 in the hyperscalers and some of the low-end Linux spaces that are really the new markets."

POWER9 at Wikipedia.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 10 2017, @02:37AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 10 2017, @02:37AM (#607862)

    I wish i knew something about machine learning. How is it different from the vector processing - the thing IBM cooked up in the 60s? Seems the modern GPUs are simply replicating it with better tech.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by julian on Sunday December 10 2017, @04:45AM

      by julian (6003) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 10 2017, @04:45AM (#607902)

      This short video series [youtube.com] will get you up to speed. It helped me finally grasp why this is so computationally intensive as it scales.

  • (Score: 2) by Snotnose on Sunday December 10 2017, @02:37AM (6 children)

    by Snotnose (1623) on Sunday December 10 2017, @02:37AM (#607863)

    Some 20 years ago I worked on a project based on the Power PC, and thought it was a great architecture. At the time the other half of the project was based on the Motorola 68030, which wikipedia is failing me now 68000 core with 4 communication modules, one of which could be used for RS-232 and one (actually 2, you had to combine 2 modules for this) ethernet.

    At the time I still was fluent in machine language, and thought the 68k architecture was much better than whatever Intel had at the time (Pentium?).

    Hnt. Hire me to write good software, not to prognosticate the future.

    --
    Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 10 2017, @02:46AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 10 2017, @02:46AM (#607865)

      Fool, 68k assembly was C more/less, a sane CISC. PowerPC was a RISC.

    • (Score: 2) by Snotnose on Sunday December 10 2017, @02:46AM (3 children)

      by Snotnose (1623) on Sunday December 10 2017, @02:46AM (#607866)

      My CPU was a 680360. neither duck duck go nor google is supporting me, but I know what I remember. Please don't tell me my memory is failing me, I watched my father in law, mother, and dad go down that rabbit hole. Someone google better than me and say the 680360 was a 1994 era chip with a 68000 core and 4 communication satellites programed by the core.

      Please....

      --
      Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 10 2017, @01:00PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 10 2017, @01:00PM (#607980)

      Is this a Power PC successor?

      Sort of. IBM claims POWER and PowerPC were merged with POWER4 back in the early 00's, but I have no idea how much it resembles the architecture of either of the earlier branches. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Architecture [wikipedia.org] for an otherview and even a diagram.

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