power cpus

I might be able to able to help. Been dealing with Power hardware since Power 4. Currently working with an environment of a mix from Power 6 to 8. What's your question?
 
its been awile and i forgot the question :p however i am still intrested in possibly using them in a project i was wondering how they compare to many chips in workstation tasks for example would a power 8 chip be better then a e5-2690? and is it posible to run a hypervisor that supports window on one?
 
its been awile and i forgot the question :p however i am still intrested in possibly using them in a project i was wondering how they compare to many chips in workstation tasks for example would a power 8 chip be better then a e5-2690? and is it posible to run a hypervisor that supports window on one?

It might help to more more specific details about your potential application to compare a Power 8 against an Intel Xeon.

About running Windows on a Power 8, you could probably figure out a way to get it to run. But it probably wouldn't run well. It won't natively run, you'd need an emulator like qemu or something similar to get it to work. Power 8's will only run IBM operating systems like AIX or little endian x86 versions of Redhat, Ubuntu, or Suse Linux. As for running a Hypervisor on Power 8, if you went the OpenPower route I think our only option is IBM PowerKVM. I'm not sure about the costs of that. If you use IBM Power 8 you could use traditional IBM PowerVM, but there youre hardware and licensing costs are going to start skyrocketing once you go down this route.

In my opinion, the costs of either IBM Power or OpenPower hardware make the benefits from Power CPU's hard to justify.
 
in would try to use it to run ~4 high preformance vms all running varius tasks from gaming to web servers and i have no idea how to compare the single core of a power 8 to the single core of a decent xeon. i would also try overclocking the power 8 abit (i heard it was possible to do with power 8 chips) are their any linux based free hypervisors that would run fine on power 8? i dont mind losing to much preformance because i will lose some anyway with xeons. i was also just looking to experiment with some new harware.
 
in would try to use it to run ~4 high preformance vms all running varius tasks from gaming to web servers and i have no idea how to compare the single core of a power 8 to the single core of a decent xeon. i would also try overclocking the power 8 abit (i heard it was possible to do with power 8 chips) are their any linux based free hypervisors that would run fine on power 8? i dont mind losing to much preformance because i will lose some anyway with xeons. i was also just looking to experiment with some new harware.

Stick with Intel.
 
Yea I saw that abit ago but it looks like it progressed abit I'm not one to buy something that dosnt exist tho
 
in would try to use it to run ~4 high preformance vms all running varius tasks from gaming to web servers and i have no idea how to compare the single core of a power 8 to the single core of a decent xeon. i would also try overclocking the power 8 abit (i heard it was possible to do with power 8 chips) are their any linux based free hypervisors that would run fine on power 8? i dont mind losing to much preformance because i will lose some anyway with xeons. i was also just looking to experiment with some new harware.

Unless those are VMs meant for running on the PowerPC ISA, like Linux/Unix/BSD/etc., you won't get very far with x86 emulation.
I don't think you will be doing much gaming on POWER8 CPUs, sad to say, unless those games are compiled for it, which no modern games are.

Web servers would be great, but that is quite the high cost to run web servers, where much lower-cost x86 equipment would more than get the job done.
While the POWER8 cores would technically be more powerful core-to-core to a modern x86 Xeon core, you are effectively trading compatibility for performance, at an extreme cost increase I might add.

What do you need this "performance" for, other than VMs, which Xeons will normally run for almost any general purpose task optimally.
I'm not against POWER CPUs, but they have a specific purpose and marketplace, which I'm not really seeing a big need for here, especially for the extreme cost they present.

From what you have said, I would have to second sticking with x86 (Intel) CPUs. :)
 
yea i think i will stick with xeons for abit. i was mainly just looking for the most power i could get and they looked pretty nice with all their threads and a high clockspeed
 
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