Do you develop for AIX and IBM i for work and have access to hardware and inspiration to do this for that reason? If not, how did you wind up picking this as a hobbyist endeavor?
It's all POWER though, and I seem to be seeing more of it around recently. I had thought that it was going to just keep on shrinking into a more niche market once Macs, Xboxes, and Playstations stopped using POWER/PowerPC processors, and Intel was dominating in the cloud, but it seems like they're actually investing again in trying to get out of the relatively small niche they're in now.
Maybe it's just my perception though; I happen to have noticed POWER related things happening in a couple of different areas recently. I haven't been following it very closely.
As for Mono itself, this particular implementation isn't an IBM project, and when I personally discussed the matter with them some ten or so years ago they said they had discussed it internally but had no particular desire to pursue it at the time. They gave me some good reasons for this but I don't remember the details.
In contrast, the i9-7980XE is MSRP of $2000, only has 4x DDR4 controllers and is single-socket only.
The 18-core Xeon Gold 6140 is $2400. Only 6x DDR4 controllers (although it seems to go up to quad-socket for what its worth).
AMD EPYC offers the single-socket 24c / 48t 7401p in and around $1300 (I'm seeing it ~$1100 and $1200). 8x DDR4, so its far more comparable to the Power9 machine. But Power9 is likely faster on a single-core basis, has a unified mesh instead of the 4x NUMA configuration of EPYC. EPYC doesn't have a unified L3 cache: tasks only effectively have 8MB of L3 (but there are lots of 8MB L3 caches scattered throughout EPYC).
So EPYC vs Power9 is a fair comparison at ~$1300, but Intel is severely overpriced in comparison. Actually, I'm not liking any of Intel's higher end options this generation, EPYC and Power9 seem superior on paper... as long as you don't need AVX-512.
I actually have an Excel spreadsheet open right now with some preliminary numbers (evaluating some random specs from a recent Anandtech article, along with Sforza CPUs, out of curiosity), and in terms of $/thread, the Sforza CP9M06, an 8-core 4SMT chip for $600, is only beaten in $/thread by a Cavium ThunderX2 9980-2200, at $18.5/core vs $14.02/core, thanks to 128 threads. But, at a price of $1,800, with a significantly lower base/turbo clock frequency (3.5GHz+ vs 2.2+) and less than 1/2th the L3 cache.
Granted, these numbers are more or less impossible to verify at this moment and unbelievably fuzzy, and it's incomplete without filling in all the data on a wider array of Xeons, EPYC machines, and real benchmarks. But the back of the envelope numbers come off as pretty solid, and my experience with POWER8 makes me think these machines will perform very well.
There is also the fact that IBM is quite open about POWER this time around, all the way to making all their firmware/boot/BMC code open, and encouraging patches, under FOSS licenses, and making all the architecture/firmware documentation freely available. Might not matter for hyperscale data centers that negotiate themselves, but certainly a nice bonus.
The biggest price-related barrier at the low end is really the cost of the mobos, though. That's where most of the TALOS II's price goes to. The CPUs are relatively cheap in comparison.
I looked into doing this briefly, and a couple blockers were that I couldn't find any easy cloud services offering POWER that I could use for testing, the cheapest dev system I could find, the Talos II Development System, is itself $5000 once you add RAM and storage (https://www.raptorcs.com/content/TL2DS1/intro.html, they do have a cheaper system available in pre-order: https://www.raptorcs.com/content/TL1BC1/intro.html), and the C intrinsics that they offer work with special overloaded functions with a vector type extension to C, making it a lot harder to use the approach of just offering wrappers for basic intrinsics and then working on higher-level support on top of that.
Looks like gnzlbg put more effort into it, but ran into similar issues: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/42743#issuecomment-...
They just laid off thousands of people from their Healthcare group. On top of thousands and thousands more in other groups recently. Couldn’t some of them have been reassigned to work on this stuff if it’s of value to IBM?
At the end of the 90s they had spent like 15+ years diverging from each other. Some more gracefully than others.
