Idea from FOSDEM: Power 11 AI workstation
During CES Nvidia announced a new AI desktop supercomputer: Project DIGITS. Starting at $3000 it puts AI processing capabilities on the desktop what just recently needed multiple servers and a few more zeroes at the end of the price tag.
As an IBM Champion for POWER my first thought was that Project DIGITS is nice, but I’d love to see something based on POWER. Of course it’s just a game of thoughts, as IBM left the workstation business many years ago, both for x86 and POWER. So, even if I had some ideas, I did not care much about them. However, at FOSDEM someone described almost the same dream AI system. It means that I’m not alone, and it’s worth sharing this idea :-) And, of course, even if it is never implemented as a workstation, the technologies are interesting to learn about.
POWER 10 already has some extra instructions related to AI, making it efficient at AI tasks even without using a GPU. You can read more about it in the IBM blog at https://developer.ibm.com/blogs/run-ai-inferencing-on-power10-leveraging-mma/. Power 11 is coming this year, and will be include these instructions while being both faster and more energy efficient.
At IBM it’s not just Power CPUs when it comes to AI. They are also working on a dedicated AI accelerator card, called Spyre. I’m an environmental engineer by degree, so I very much appreciate IBM’s approach here. They focus on energy efficiency. If a single card does not provide you with enough processing capabilities, you can use multiple easy to cool cards, which also helps to reduce hardware failure rates.
After all this introduction I guess you could figure out our idea: a Power 11 + Spyre AI accelerator workstation. Just the smallest Power 11 CPU coupled with a single Spyre AI accelerator card and an entry level graphics card, all nicely packed in a well sealed silent case. The GPU here is just to drive the screen, not for AI. It could lower the entry barrier to AI on Power, and make developers more passionate about their jobs.
Why a workstation, and why do I mention passion? Having a workstation is not a requirement to develop for an architecture. However, I know from talking to people at FOSDEM, many other conferences or on-line, that most developers have more passion working on things on a machine on / under their desk. In the open source world, many important developments are born due to passion, in spare time, even by paid developers. Having a Power workstation with AI also could help in keeping POWER relevant in the open source world.
