An Open Source Motherboard?!

[CPotter]

 

Thanks to IBM Systems for sponsoring our coverage at Think 2019! Check them out at https://ibm.co/2T5lWt3 

 

Check out Raptor Computer Systems at https://lmg.gg/8KVhr 

OpenPOWER: https://openpowerfoundation.org/tag/ai/

[TempestCatto]

I feel obligated to only run an open source OS on the open source hardware.

[Bananasplit_00]

Pretty cool tbh

[kuhnertdm]

Neat stuff! Got a little irritated at "Binary BLOBs" though

[power666]

Ummm... those POWER9 chips have eight memory channels.  As such, the more fully populated the memory channels, the faster the system gets.  POWER loves memory bandwidth.

 

The big iron POWER9's use a different socket as they support buffered memory.  Still eight channels to those buffers but afterward there can be four DDR4 channels per buffer.    That is a maximum of 64 DIMMs per socket and 16 TB of memory using the new 256 GB LR-DIMMs.  Oh, and 16 of those sockets can be configured together bringing memory capacity up to 256 TB of memory.  That's four times more than x86 chips can physically support in a system.*

 

One thing not mentioned is that the high speed nvLink bus from the POWER9 chips only works through mezzanine connectors for Tesla accelerators.  Conceptually nVidia could enable nvLink over the PCIe connector upon boot up but the Quadro GP100 and Quadro GV100 are limited to nvLink off of their own connector at the top of the graphics board multi-GPU setups.   Still hyper fast and coherent with the POWER9 memory base.  Oh, and the nvLink ports on the POWER9 don't utilize the normal nvLink ports on the nvSwitch.  It is possible to build a dual socket POWER9 system with 32 Tesla GV100 chips all full coherent and two hops (source -> nvSwitch -> destination) between nodes.  If only there was a Tesla with a monitor output so we could try 32-way SLI (eat your heart out Quantum 3D).

 

*Cascade Lake is opening up higher capacity support as well as enabling Optane DIMMs for some truly crazy capacities.  

[William Payne]

The comments on that video are face palming. Why do people not realise that there is an entire specialised use case out there that does not involve gaming or windows.

[olddellian]

I've been eagerly waiting for this video since I saw the tweet of Linus playing Xonotic in February!

 

On 3/22/2019 at 8:51 PM, power666 said:

those POWER9 chips have eight memory channels

Not all of them do; you can see in some parts of the video that Linus is holding two differently-sized CPU modules. The smaller one is Sforza, which is what Blackbird (the board Linus holds up) and Talos II (the dual socket system he plays Xonotic on) use; it has four channels. The larger module is either LaGrange or Monza, both of which do have eight channels, but are more expensive.

 

Technically, all three modules are using the same silicon, so the extra DDR4 controllers are still physically there on the die, but are probably disabled on Sforza. Even if they were functional, the Sforza socket, LGA 2601, has much fewer pins than the Monza/LaGrange socket, LGA 3899. I imagine some of those extra 1298 pins are for DDR4.

 

The RCS company/community wiki at has a pretty good explanation of the different modules if you're curious.

[olddellian]

This video reminds me, last year @Dylanc1500 said,

Quote

I got Portal 2 to work on "my totally personal not work owned" Power9 workstation with through Linux. It was a very rough experiment with some different drivers.

Was this on a Talos II, or some other POWER9 system?

[olddellian]

Wendell from Level1Techs recently did an interview with Timothy from Raptor Computing Systems, the company that makes the Talos II. So if you want to hear more about it, as well as some banter on the state of open hardware in general, it's probably worth a watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5Ihqg72T3c