 So IBM sponsored us down to IBM Think 2019, and I'm here walking around in this veritable sea of next-generation technology. Like, they've got everything here, from cloud computing to AI to quantum computing, both from IBM and its partners, and then I spot this out of the corner of my eye. Now, this might not look unusual at all. We've got, what, like a motherboard and like a workstation or something, but what you're looking at here contains tech that at this time is simply not available from the CPU companies that most consumers would think of. PCI Express Gen 4? Yeah, right here. So these systems are running CPUs based on IBM's Power 9 architecture, and what's really cool is that the hardware for them, basically all of it, even this motherboard, is open source. What on earth does that mean? Let me explain that. So IBM's Power architecture is nothing new. In fact, if you bought a Mac back in the early 2000s, you've used it before. But over the last 10 to 15 years, it's gotten some big upgrades, and the Power 9 processors in our demo rig here are the same ones in everything from high-performance network storage appliances to literal supercomputers. But what makes them open source? Well, the CPUs themselves are not, although IBM actually does allow even CPU hardware technology to be licensed, but it's the ecosystem around them that is. That's where the Open Power Foundation comes in. So now, instead of only being able to get a Power 9 solution from IBM directly, you can get one from half a dozen or so different manufacturers. And what we're looking at here are examples of ones that are open in every way. So this motherboard, I could just, assuming that I had the means, I could just download the schematics and build one myself. It's crazy. Even down to the firmware. So it's got these two BIOS chips with actually this really cool solution. So you can actually flip this little dip switch and write protectors so that they can't become corrupted or infected in any way. And I could just build the whole thing and it would be ready to rock. And then I could just run standard software on it like Linux or FreeBSD. So this system right here is running regular old Linux. And other than the fact that it's Power 9 instead of x86, is every bit as normal a workstation or tower server as you could expect. So you got a couple CPU sockets for up to a total of 44 cores. You got 16 memory slots. They run quad channel memory. I mean, the thing that's exceptional about it is how sort of unexceptional it is. It just looks like a normal motherboard. You've even got just like a standard Radeon Pro workstation graphics card in here. X5 sound card of all things and PCI Express slots. I mean, they're Gen 4. That's cool. But like, yeah, USB header. It's just a normal friggin thing. Like, can I just like run video games on this thing? HyperX gaming keyboard and mouse on here. Nice. I like it. Keeping it classy, right? Enterprise show. So this is what, like a Quake Arena style. Oh, my God, this mouse is so sensitive. Is this a shotgun? Oh, God, this is the rail gun again. Oh, oh, balls. There you go. You're done. This is like the least appropriate possible use of a system like this. I love it. Team using development workstation for gaming. That's my team. One more. One more. Oh, no, I finally... I died. OK, so that's probably enough of me playing games on the very serious tool, actually. Let's talk about why all of this. So the openness of OpenPower has some key advantages. From a performance standpoint, it's allowed faster ecosystem development. So they're already shipping not just PCI Express Gen 4, which is about twice as fast as the third Gen bus that everyone else is using right now, but they also have support for OpenCAPI, which is twice as fast as PCIe Gen 4, and the ability to run up to three Tesla V100 GPUs off of a single CPU using NVLink, which is not only faster again than OpenCAPI, but it also allows for full data coherency between the CPUs and the up to six GPUs that you can handle in a dual CPU system. So that means that they don't have to wait around to share information between them, speeding up computationally intensive workloads, like, in particular, AI. Then there's the security side of things. With Spectre and Meltdown to some extent, but more with some of the recent concerns about the management engine on some processors, there's a huge part of the open source community, or just the computing community in general, that wants more openness when it comes to hardware. A high-performance chip that has no binary blobs on it, and you can build everything from source. And that is exactly what we're looking at here. So Power9 processors are available in a wide variety of configurations, with anywhere from as few as four to as many as 22 processing cores, but there are a few things that they all have in common. Quad-channel DDR4, 44 PCIe Gen 4 lanes per CPU, and a ton of optimization for massively parallel workloads. So you might be familiar with technologies that use SMT to allow a single CPU core to work on more than one thread at a time. Well, rather than two threads, Power9 can handle four threads per CPU. So a fully loaded 44-core rig like this one can handle 176 threads. Now then, obviously most people aren't just running out and buying one of these, and one of these, and DIY-ing a tower for the receptionist in their office with it or whatever. So the question that this raises then is why have a low-cost board like this, or even relatively speaking, a low-cost board like this one? Well, systems like this are mostly geared towards developers, so that they have an affordable way to test their code at their desk. With that said though, that's not necessarily because it has to be that way forever. With the right software, either of these could be adapted for more conventional, you know, consumer or professional use. It's just that that's not the focus right now. So they're mainly there for the developers who are writing code for the bigger systems, like IBM's AC922, this crazy powerful AI-optimized server platform that's been used in the Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Labs, which by the way contain the number two and number one respectively most powerful supercomputers in the world right now. Here's another one. This is something IBM's calling Power AI Vision, and this is like a new program without a ton of adoption yet, but there's some amazing real-world applications. So they did some stuff with Frontier Development Labs that involved space weather, specifically tracking solar flares, recognizing that a hundred years ago there was one that fried all of the basic electronics on Earth at the time, and they figure, wow, if that were to happen today, that would be like a multi-trillion dollar event, like civilization as we know it threatening. So they're trying to use deep learning and machine learning to put together historical and predictive data so that we could prepare for that. Pretty freaky cool and important, right? I mean, I guess that's kind of the theme overall of the show here. And all that's left now is to thank IBM for sponsoring this and thank you guys for watching our video from here down at IBM Think 2019. 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