What to do with POWER6 chips?

[jackdoerner]

I've recently come into possession of a set of four 4.7ghz POWER6+ chips. They are bare processors - not installed in processor cards, as is found in most systems, which I presume means they probably came out of blades. Thus far I've had quite a hard time finding something useful to do with them. Does anyone know where I could find a motherboard/system to match them for a reasonable price, or is that more-or-less impossible? I know these things are licensed on a per-core basis, but I'm not exactly sure how that licensing works, maybe someone could enlighten me there as well.

Ideally, I would like to use them to build a high performance machine for 3D rendering and transcoding (I work at a media company), probably running gentoo or fedora. Is this possible for a reasonable price? Is this possible at all? Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thus far I've had quite a time trying to find useful information.

 

[rds1220]

I really don't know what you're going to do with them. They are kind of old they were annouced in 2006 by IBM and released in 2007 so like I said they are kind of old. Unless you have a machine that can accept these chips I don't see what you're going to do with it. The only thing I can think of is sell them and make some money then put tha money towards a new computer.

 

[popatim]

The only thing they were ever put in were IBM power6 servers. See if you can pick up an old 550 server, ebay them, or just throw them out.

 

[jackdoerner]

Do you by any chance know what the constraints on a system to put them in are? Will any old 550 do, or would it need to be one sold with the same 4.7ghz POWER6es? I presume that they're incompatible with a POWER5 based 550?

In spite of the fact that they're a generation old, I'm fairly confident that they'll outperform any intel chip I can find. At any rate, they'll outperform my similarly old Q6600 by a mile.

 

[InvalidError]

Turning them into keychains is always an option.

 

[rds1220]

Do you by any chance know what the constraints on a system to put them in are? Will any old 550 do, or would it need to be one sold with the same 4.7ghz POWER6es? I presume that they're incompatible with a POWER5 based 550?

In spite of the fact that they're a generation old, I'm fairly confident that they'll outperform any intel chip I can find. At any rate, they'll outperform my similarly old Q6600 by a mile.

Any Intel chip you can find, like what a Pentium 4. I have a hard time believing that a CPU from 2006 will out perform a current I7 or Xeon processor. If IBM can create a CPU that can out perform current CPU's after four and a half years than thatw the ultimate future proofing, if they can do that than they are the gods of CPU's.

 

[jackdoerner]

Any Intel chip you can find, like what a Pentium 4. I have a hard time believing that a CPU from 2006 will out perform a current I7 or Xeon processor. If IBM can create a CPU that can out perform current CPU's after four and a half years than thatw the ultimate future proofing, if they can do that than they are the gods of CPU's.

Well, you must remember that these are not desktop-grade processors. These are high performance, enterprise grade chips, and when they were shiny and new (which I believe, these being POWER6+, would be around 2008), They costs tens of thousands of dollars each (or so I have read - the register claims that the 4.2 ghz version was $64000 each after a price cut). They're the sort of thing you often find in supercomputers and mainframes. These days they're quite out of date (having been replaced by POWER7 and the Cell BE from IBM), but I'm fairly confident they'll still outpace any consumer grade hardware I could get my hands on - especially considering that I don't have to pay money for them.

Now that said - I could be wrong. It's quite difficult to find benchmark comparisons... and the few that I could find are all measured in BOPS or TPS, &c.

The question isn't really "is there a better solution", but "what can I do with the parts I have"

 

[rds1220]

Like I said earlier they were announced in 06 and released in 07. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER6. I know Wikipedia is a joke but from what I can remeber it backs up my time frame of 07. Also like I said I don't know what you're going to do with it if you don't have an IBM server that can use it.

 

[InvalidError]

Well, you must remember that these are not desktop-grade processors. These are high performance, enterprise grade chips,

That depends on the type of performance the code you run needs. With Power7, IBM has gone one step further in the same direction as the UltraSparc T2: trade ILP for TLP and energy efficiency by giving each core quad-SMT. This would make it a horrible desktop chip since the vast majority of PC applications and games have horrible to nonexistant TLP.

If you look at November's Top500, Xeon 55xx/56xx make up a huge chunk of the listing and most of the top-10 belongs to Xeons and Opterons. The highest-ranked IBM Power-based system ranks 17th place, 10th if we include PowerXcell. Power6/7 make up only a tiny slice of the pie, visibly not a supercomputing favorite anymore.

 

[popatim]

Typically these processors went into cards and you had to pay ibm extra to turn on each core. And by extra I mean to the tune of like 20,000.oo
A little more digging I found they could also be had in the updated 520 power6+ servers