The Question Nobody Asked (But I’m Answering Anyway) I have an IBM POWER8 server from 2014. It has 160 hardware threads. It draws 400W at idle. It sounds like a jet engine warming up. I compiled .NET 8 from source on it, then built Jellyfin 10.11 in nine increasingly desperate attempts, and now it’s streaming movies to my living room. My wife thinks I have a problem. She’s correct. But that’s not the point. ...
A Tale of Two Philosophies: When 160 Threads Meet Modern Silicon I have a problem. I see weird computer hardware on eBay, and I buy it. Last year’s victim: an IBM POWER8 S822LC server from 2015. Cost: $50. Shipping: $200. The look on my partner’s face when it arrived: priceless. Everyone told me it was a relic, a curiosity, basically e-waste with RGB lights (okay, it doesn’t have RGB, but it should). But staring at those specs—160 hardware threads via SMT-8—I couldn’t help but wonder: could raw, embarrassing parallelism compete with modern single-thread supremacy? ...