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Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#11

Post by _chu1 »

dilippkumar wrote: post #7

IBM is currently shipping Power10 while Raptor ships Power9 in the Talos II. If I understand correctly, they had issues getting to a fully open source firmware solution for a Talos III with a Power10 in it. This actually made me hold off on spending $10k on a computer that's last-generation technology. I suspect I'm not alone - a lot of interest in OpenPOWER is probably waiting for Power11 and Talos III or whatever p…

They ended up going with a different platform that's still newer than Power9. It's even bi-endian.

https://www.talospace.com/2023/10/the-next-raptor-openpower-...

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#12

Post by kkfx »

I do care about big iron, about open hardware, but... I do not have the financial firepower to help developing a computer architecture, and buying expensive iron with limited software support is not much interesting. At least if some major distro do support OpenPower as a tier-1 arch, meaning almost all packages are there, updated at the same speed (almost, at least) of amd64 well... I can buy a classic workstation and making that a main personal desktop. I can't do much more otherwise...

PS while I prize and want open hardware I really doubt it can really be auditable at hw level, at least for most owners, even if technically well skilled. Projects of a certain size can be known only if they are FLOSS from the first SLoC in a way a spread community born around them, knowing them from the start and passing knowledge.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#14

Post by snovymgodym »

The Talos stuff is cool but it's priced way too high for anyone who isn't taking a business expense tax deduction for it. Especially post 2020, the pricing for their products has gone way up.

It's what, $6000 for the 4-core, 8GB memory entry level model?

I know it isn't that insane considering what new and used POWER servers cost, but also is anyone using these who isn't locked into AIX or IBM i? Is there any real reason to use POWER when priced against commodity AMD64 machines?

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#15

Post by _chu1 »

If a company is serious about making POWER based SBCs or motherboards that are affordable yet fast enough for enthusiasts (no ECC, commonly used components), there would be a lot more interest. The price is what would make me turn away from POWER, as much as I love it and the ability for it to be based on completely open hardware. Someone with a lot of new ideas and a lot of energy doing something crazy like x86 binary translation or a Cell-styled CPU would also bring more attention to the platform.

RISC-V built a lot of traction very fast and was affordable and is now starting to be competitive with ARM, so it has different circumstances around it.

There's a group developing a POWER based laptop with a quad-core NXP processor, I've been watching them since 2020 and they've made some pretty good progress. It even has an MXM3 slot for adding a dedicated video card.

https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#16

Post by E39M5S62 »

It's simply too expensive. People that want to play around with a non-x86_64 system can buy one of a thousand different ARM devices and get all sorts of software running on it. If you want POWER, you're buying old datacenter gear with all the downsides of that class of hardware - or you're buying a Raptor system where the price has skyrocketed in recent years for aging hardware.

I pre-ordered a Blackbird motherboard and 32 thread CPU and got it in 2019. I used it as my main workstation until 2022 and then decided I'd had enough fighting the software ecosystem. I still have the machine because I've regretted selling other odd hardware in the past ... especially my dual 133mhz BeBox.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#17

Post by twic »

h2odragon wrote: post #5
sandwichbop wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is expensive, as far as I understand it (I'm still just learning about it all), it is for those need total auditability, they mention EU a lot but also this seems catered to actual individuals who really want a truly open system that doesn't scarifice performance (RISC-V seems great for embedded but is still not there for high end workflows). To me, this sounds like a reasonable price for what they're providing bu…

I have vague memories of PPC instructions sucking compared to alpha, sparc, and x86, 20 years or more ago. I've got no specific memories what my objection was; but I recall dropping my plans to support it as a platform after a very quick look at it. Perhaps it didn't have atomics at that point? That would've killed it for that project.

PowerPC uses LL/SC for synchronisation, which is very different to the classic x86 approach. Maybe you didn't like that? But i think Alpha and ARM use that too.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#18

Post by mdasen »

h2odragon wrote: post #5
sandwichbop wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is expensive, as far as I understand it (I'm still just learning about it all), it is for those need total auditability, they mention EU a lot but also this seems catered to actual individuals who really want a truly open system that doesn't scarifice performance (RISC-V seems great for embedded but is still not there for high end workflows). To me, this sounds like a reasonable price for what they're providing bu…

I have vague memories of PPC instructions sucking compared to alpha, sparc, and x86, 20 years or more ago. I've got no specific memories what my objection was; but I recall dropping my plans to support it as a platform after a very quick look at it. Perhaps it didn't have atomics at that point? That would've killed it for that project.

It seems unlikely that Power completely lacked atomics. This is a very vague recollection since it's been a long time, but I feel like there were some differences. I think PowerPC used a load-linked/store-conditional with a stronger guarantee than a CAS (compare and swap) on x86. For example, if x = 1 and you CAS it to a new value, another thread might have changed it to 8 and then back to 1 in the meantime and it'll still succeed (the ABA problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_problem).

I think x86 also has a stronger memory model providing less flexibility, but greater consistency.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#19

Post by _chu1 »

ensignavenger wrote: post #8
ensignavenger wrote: post #6

There are some people who care, otherwise it wouldn't even be a thing... but as you say, it doesn't get a lot of attention. I think it would be interesting to hear why? Why do companies implementing RISC-V and actively working on developing it not choose OpenPOWER instead? For that matter, OpenSPARC? I am not well enough versed in instruction sets to really comment, but I would love to hear more from anyone in the kn…

I did some looking, and it appears that OpenSparc is copyleft (GPLv2) which, combined with Oracle Yuck, may be a huge reason it is held back from wider interest. However, OpenPower stuff seems to all be Apache licensed from their repos. I could not find the RISC-V license, but it appears to be extremely liberal as well.

OpenSPARC is apparently used as a base for the Elbrus CPU line in Russia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus-8S

That specific chip I linked to the article about has the ability to run x86 code via translation and they claim it can run Windows. Guess that solves the chicken and egg issue, but the biggest problem is who would be willing to fab it for them, sad that politics and war interrupted this.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#20

Post by SpecialistK »

I suspect IBM opened up the ISA (and some hardware designs) because they were quickly losing market relevance. Apple and gaming have moved on, new projects will use Arm or RISC-V, so the only markets I can think of are:

* automotive and other legacy embedded applications

* data centers with existing POWER applications

* niche workstations like the Talos

I do enjoy alternative ISAs, so I'd love to be wrong on this.

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