[CentOS] IBM buying RedHat

[Simon Matter]

> On 2018-10-30 02:46, Simon Matter wrote:
>>> On 10/29/18 1:55 AM, Simon Matter wrote:
>>>> To me it seems like, if they are smart, they will try to push IBM
>>>> POWER
>>>> and RedHat Linux together to establish real competition in the
>>>> hardware
>>>> market again (and of course don't forget to keep Fedora/CentOS
>>>> alive)!
>>>
>>> Er, RHEL has been running on Power for a very long time.  The fastest
>>> supercomputer in the world is Power9 + RHEL.
>>
>> What I meant is that POWER could become a competitor for Intel/AMD
>> based
>> servers. We're now running AMD EPYC servers with 64Cores/128Threads and
>> we
>> didn't find any POWER system which could compete in this area.
>>
>> Also, looking at TOP500 list there are not so many POWER systems
>> anymore.
>> IBM could change this now.
>
> IBM's Power8 and Power9 servers run 8 threads per core, so a 24 core
> Power 8 server runs 192 threads, as long as the operating system can
> handle it, you should be fine.
>
> And if you're looking for major operations running on Power, look no
> farther than Google...they're a huge part of the Power consortium and
> run a huge farm of Power systems on Tyan boards.

Well, Google is in a different situation. They can even request their own
modified motherboards and customize so they get exactly what they want. We
can not do that in the SME market.

What was looking very interesting was this Raptor server:
https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2SV1/intro.html

However, the bigger POWER9 CPUs were not available at the time we were
looking at it - this has changed now.

Still I wasn't sure how to compare the real life speed of POWER9 compared
to something like the AMD EPYC 7601. And then, will everything work smooth
on POWER the same way it does on the AMD? POWER seems still not a first
preference arch for CentOS, so how would it impact us? Is it smart to add
another CPU arch if we still have to run some X86 code, like in our case
SAP MaxDB (which is also available for AIX on POWER but not Linux on
POWER)?

In the end we decided for AMD EPYC but kept the POWER thing in mind. Now
that IBM announces the purchase of RedHat it just reminded me that this
could become interesting again in the future. Let's see how it goes.

Regards,
Simon