TYAN Launches Its First OpenPOWER Reference System

[phoronix]

Phoronix: TYAN Launches Its First OpenPOWER Reference System

Our hardware friends at TYAN have announced their first customer reference system built around OpenPOWER, the collaboration around IBM's Power Architecture with the Power ISA and other technology being opened up. TYAN's "Palmetto System" is promoted as being innovative, collaborative, and open...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTgwNzg

[edwaleni]

I thought I would mention that I have run into an odd situation with Power 8 where the fact it can process 8 threads per core. Many enterprise license agreements work on a "per core" basis. Anyone doing a Power to Xeon migration has been a bit startled to find out the license costs to support such a move can be significant. Those Xeon's are lucky to nab 2 threads per core at any time. When looking at queue depths, we are finding we need more Xeon cores to meet our requirements.

I work with a some applications that have large amounts of threads involved. Now that Power 8 can run RHEL 7.x, I am very interested in seeing where Open Power is going to go. Migrating JVM work loads is a minor transition. Migrating database workloads is much different.

The only "debit" in Power 8 that I can find is that TDP. 300 watts in turbo mode is a lot of BTU's to shed. You need a lot of performance per watt to accept such high requirements.

If by going open in the POWER space can get some prices down, I am all for it. But if they think by making POWER "open" they are going to expand their market share, they have a long row to hoe.

[dweigert]

It will make more inroads into truly open source and scientific computing first, rather than Enterprise applications, I believe. Think OpenStack, and such.