ibm IBM Reveals Next-Generation IBM POWER10 Processor

[Athan Immortal]

Summary

 IBM will release a new processor made using Samsung's 7nm process node in the second half of 2021

 

Quotes

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IBM's First Commercialized 7nm Processor that is expected to deliver up to a 3x improvement in capacity and processor energy efficiency within the same power envelope as IBM POWER9, allowing for greater performance.

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Support for Multi-Petabyte Memory Clusters with a breakthrough new technology called Memory Inception, designed to improve cloud capacity and economics for memory-intensive workloads from ISVs like SAP, the SAS Institute, and others as well as large-model AI inference.

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New Hardware-Enabled Security Capabilities including transparent memory encryption designed to support end-to-end security. The IBM POWER10 processor is engineered to achieve significantly faster encryption performance with quadruple the number of AES encryption engines per core compared to IBM POWER9 for today's most demanding standards and anticipated future cryptographic standards like quantum-safe cryptography and fully homomorphic encryption. It also brings new enhancements to container security.

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New Processor Core Architectures in the IBM POWER10 processor with an embedded Matrix Math Accelerator which is extrapolated to provide 10x, 15x and 20x faster AI inference for FP32, BFloat16 and INT8 calculations per socket respectively than the IBM POWER9 processor to infuse AI into business applications and drive greater insights.

 

My thoughts

There's been a few rumours around the yield problems at Samsung and their 8nm node, so this is an interesting development, showing perhaps that they think they'll be on top of that by the second half of next year enough to bring a brand new processor on a brand new node.

 

Would love for Anthony to get a hold of something like this and do some comparisons in linux, then let Linus come in and game on Steam's proton (if it worked).

 

Sources

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2020-08-17-IBM-Reveals-Next-Generation-IBM-POWER10-Processor

[Video Beagle]

Man, I wish I understood more about processors on a hardware level to "get" this. There's just a level were te tech just becomes "elves do it" for me.

[RejZoR]

1 hour ago, Video Beagle said:

Man, I wish I understood more about processors on a hardware level to "get" this. There's just a level were te tech just becomes "elves do it" for me.

It's not the elves. It's electron dwarfs whizzing around nanometer sized streets of CPU megacity.

[Video Beagle]

1 minute ago, RejZoR said:

It's not the elves. It's electron dwarfs whizzing around nanometer sized streets of CPU megacity.

  See? I just don't understand the processor level stuff!  Confusing elves for dwarfs....

[bcredeur97]

These will just be shoved in boxes running the AIX os and prob hosting databases. Seems to be what most people use it for. 

IBM is cutting edge in some ways and absolutely out of date in others. They also charge a lot more than x86 vendors. It's kinda weird.

[leadeater]

38 minutes ago, Video Beagle said:

  See? I just don't understand the processor level stuff!  Confusing elves for dwarfs....

Dwarfs are the L1 cache and Elves are the L2 cache, one does the hard yards and the other works the magic to keep things running.

[StDragon]

35 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Dwarfs are the L1 cache and Elves are the L2 cache, one does the hard yards and the other works the magic to keep things running.

And ring zero to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

[rcmaehl]

2 hours ago, Video Beagle said:

Man, I wish I understood more about processors on a hardware level to "get" this. There's just a level were te tech just becomes "elves do it" for me.

You see when a rock and lightning like each other very much

[Doobeedoo]

Is it made from quantonium though. 

[Sauron]

8 minutes ago, StDragon said:

And ring zero to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

[RejZoR]

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

Dwarfs are the L1 cache and Elves are the L2 cache, one does the hard yards and the other works the magic to keep things running.

Yeah, but which elves are in L2 and L3 ? I'm guessing Dark Elves in L2 and High Elves in L3. Correct?

[dalekphalm]

I'm pleased to see that IBM is still developing their Power series architecture. I'm curious what the real world improvements are.

 

These are strictly datacenter CPU's at this point. AFAIK the last consumer Power series was the PowerPC series with Mac, which ultimately died when they went to Intel and x86.

 

@Athan Immortal also I doubt Proton would even run on these - Proton, as far as I'm aware, just basically runs WINE, modified specifically for gaming use. WINE/Proton is designed to translate Windows commands to Linux commands, but it still assumes an x86 architecture and instruction set. While in theory you probably could make WINE run on other platforms, I don't think it would work out of the box.

[RejZoR]

I wonder how this compares to EPYC or Xeon solutions in similar workloads.

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

I'm pleased to see that IBM is still developing their Power series architecture. I'm curious what the real world improvements are.

 

These are strictly datacenter CPU's at this point. AFAIK the last consumer Power series was the PowerPC series with Mac, which ultimately died when they went to Intel and x86.

 

@Athan Immortal also I doubt Proton would even run on these - Proton, as far as I'm aware, just basically runs WINE, modified specifically for gaming use. WINE/Proton is designed to translate Windows commands to Linux commands, but it still assumes an x86 architecture and instruction set. While in theory you probably could make WINE run on other platforms, I don't think it would work out of the box.

PowerPC chips were in the PS3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo GameCube/Wii/WiiU, which means it was discontinued in 2017.

Power is related to PowerPC, but has never been in consumer hardware (at least not as we know it.) The PS3/Xbox 360 CPU was roughly Power4 and the WiiU was still PowerPC 750-based making it a direct descendant of the iMac G3's CPU (not the G4 and not the G5 which was Power4.)

 

And Wine would never work on a non-intel CPU because it requires Intel-CPU binaries and thus it would require a dynamic recomplier of some sort and at that point you may as well just boot up a VM that can already does that.

[Drama Lama]

PCIe 5 

come on intel hurry up

[Drama Lama]

curios for some big super computers 

[Jet_ski]

9 hours ago, Athan Immortal said:

Summary

 IBM will release a new processor made using Samsung's 7nm process node in the second half of 2021

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

There's been a few rumours around the yield problems at Samsung and their 8nm node, so this is an interesting development, showing perhaps that they think they'll be on top of that by the second half of next year enough to bring a brand new processor on a brand new node.

 

Would love for Anthony to get a hold of something like this and do some comparisons in linux, then let Linus come in and game on Steam's proton (if it worked).

 

Sources

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2020-08-17-IBM-Reveals-Next-Generation-IBM-POWER10-Processor

Can you plug this in to an i5 Dual Core MacBook “Pro” through the thunderbolt port? Asking for a friend.

[CarlBar]

9 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Yeah, but which elves are in L2 and L3 ? I'm guessing Dark Elves in L2 and High Elves in L3. Correct?

 

Where does that leave all other elf types? Well the Superfluous Elves are probably on the tape backups.

[leadeater]

8 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

These are strictly datacenter CPU's at this point

Well that has been the case since, hell I forget the year Apple moved to Intel but since then. Other than custom chips for consoles. IBM left the consumer PC market decades ago now, no surprise everyone is like what? IBM Power?

[dalekphalm]

36 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Well that has been the case since, hell I forget the year Apple moved to Intel but since then. Other than custom chips for consoles. IBM left the consumer PC market decades ago now, no surprise everyone is like what? IBM Power?

Yeah - a lot of people haven't even heard of them before - or at best had long since forgotten that Power CPU's were ever a thing.