IBM

Depends. If the machine came pre-activated it should -- and the operative word is should -- stay that way as long as the VPD module is not tampered with. However, in my case, trying to reset the system backplane upset the apple cart even with a known good code. IBM eventually did spit out a new one, thank goodness, but if you experience a hardware failure that requires replacement of the entire backplane as I did, you might wind up in the same situation. Essentially you should not take more than a single core and 16GB of RAM for granted; more cores or more RAM requires activation codes. At least POWER6 has SMT.

Unfortunately I'm quite sure that HP and Snoracle are the same way about their proprietary hardware, which is why I'm looking forward to getting an OpenPOWER machine to play with Real Soon Now.

OpenPOWER looks interesting, but if you don't have AIX, what does it have over a new Xeon? I'm genuinely curious about the details.

wenp wrote: OpenPOWER looks interesting, but if you don't have AIX, what does it have over a new Xeon? I'm genuinely curious about the details.

viewtopic.php?p=7368605#p7368605 sums it up with benchmarks.

The core points:

• Power8 is really fast
• Having an 8-issue pipeline (vs 4-issue on current x86 cores) probably helps
• Being able to issue from 8 threads on a single cycle (vs 2 threads on the vast majority of anything else, including Intel and SPARC) probably does too
• i also suspect the 96MB L3 cache doesn't hurt

It's also a licensable core, which to the best of my knowledge current Xeon big-core IP is not. If you have the means (and plenty of companies do), you can slap it on a die with your own peripherals and accelerators (think encryption, on-chip networking MAC, compression, workload-specific fixed-function blocks...)

Kira wrote: [*]Power8 is really fast

Just on speed? I was sort of expecting that hardware support for virtualization would be a factor. Is PowerVM a big advantage, or can you approach similar performance with Xeon?

wenp wrote:

Kira wrote: [*]Power8 is really fast

Just on speed? I was sort of expecting that hardware support for virtualization would be a factor. Is PowerVM a big advantage, or can you approach similar performance with Xeon?

There's no longer any magical virtualization advantage to Power that i'm aware of. There might be some, but Xeon virtualization performance is already exceptionally low overhead; it's had support for virtualization in hardware for some years now. However, extremely aggressive multithreading helps virtualization workloads significantly. Faster processors in general directly result in faster virtualization performance, and Power8 is definitely fast.

Additionally, PowerVM is going extinct for Linux-only workloads on PPC in favor of KVM.

KVM is pretty good speed-wise. I haven't compared it to other commercial solutions but for my personal use it was like running on the hardware itself. My disk system was the biggest slowdown.