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Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#101

Post by inkyoto »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #71
MisterTea wrote: post #36

> is there something I'm missing? Affordable, mature hardware. The Talos systems are starting at 3k for a quad core CPU on a micro ATX board. Same thing happened to MIPS and Sparc. Performance and technical merit mean nothing vs cheap and ubiquitous hardware. It's a lot of cash for a what amounts to an experimental toy. They are also a bit finicky as a friend bought one from another dev that refuses to post for unkno…

> The only reason Risc-V matters is that no one has to pay for licenses. Well it’s also a clean design that learns from the past 30 users and has got some traction with lota of material available and a rapidly growing ecosystem.

For the sake of my own curiosity, what is unclean about or in the POWER ISA?

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#102

Post by [deleted] »

andrewf wrote: post #100
electroly wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

x64 and ARM64 are both little endian on Linux and Windows; there are never endianness issues when moving from Windows/x64 to Linux/ARM64. You can freely assume little endian and that's fine in this combination. It's one of many benefits ARM64 has going for it that IBM POWER does not.

The commercial Linux world (see https://github.com/open-mpi/ompi/issues/4349 ) and other open source OSes (eg FreeBSD) seem to have lined up behind little-endian PowerPC. IBM still has a big-endian problem with AIX, IBM i, and Linux on Z.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#103

Post by [deleted] »

andrewf wrote: post #100
electroly wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

x64 and ARM64 are both little endian on Linux and Windows; there are never endianness issues when moving from Windows/x64 to Linux/ARM64. You can freely assume little endian and that's fine in this combination. It's one of many benefits ARM64 has going for it that IBM POWER does not.

The commercial Linux world (see https://github.com/open-mpi/ompi/issues/4349 ) and other open source OSes (eg FreeBSD) seem to have lined up behind little-endian PowerPC. IBM still has a big-endian problem with AIX, IBM i, and Linux on Z.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#104

Post by [deleted] »

andrewf wrote: post #100
electroly wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

x64 and ARM64 are both little endian on Linux and Windows; there are never endianness issues when moving from Windows/x64 to Linux/ARM64. You can freely assume little endian and that's fine in this combination. It's one of many benefits ARM64 has going for it that IBM POWER does not.

The commercial Linux world (see https://github.com/open-mpi/ompi/issues/4349 ) and other open source OSes (eg FreeBSD) seem to have lined up behind little-endian PowerPC. IBM still has a big-endian problem with AIX, IBM i, and Linux on Z.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#105

Post by frabre »

sandwichbop wrote: post #96
frabre wrote: post #83

I care! And I know a lot of people who care, but we are still a niche sized group. I care mainly because of Raptor Computing Systems offerings, which I think are the main (only?) OpenPOWER systems available. I use a Blackbird, and I'm happy with it. From my own point of view, I'm willing to spend a $$$$ premium on hardware where I can have assurances that from the time I boot it, only code I authorize to run is run.…

>The bottom line is that this is the only hardware currently in production that is going in the direction promised by the personal computing revolution back in the 1970s and 80s and is still capable of handling most people's current general computing needs. I write this hoping that other people like me who are reading this understand the importance of keeping hardware like this alive. this is what I believe as well,…

Interesting take! I hadn't considered that there could be an inversion where suddenly desktops are no longer commodity products.

It got me thinking--something similar happened to digital cameras where all the cheap point and shoots were replaced by phones so that now standalone cameras are an expensive niche for photographers.

OpenPOWER piggybacks off of IBM's high end POWER offerings, which are themselves part of a big enterprise market for scientific and financial computing. The OpenPOWER derivatives use IBM's POWER 8/9 chips.

I started looking for an alternative to commodity desktops when news came out that there were ring 0/-1/-2/-3 vulnerabilities in chips and I realized I had no idea what code was running on my computer. A lot of people just applied the mitigations and shrugged like it was perfectly normal that they couldn't really control their own computers.

When Raptor came out with their offerings, I thought it was great: full ownership of my computer, and as an added bonus some premium IBM chips from another architecture. I know people who spend more than I spent just on graphics cards every year.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#106

Post by simne »

frabre wrote: post #105
sandwichbop wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The bottom line is that this is the only hardware currently in production that is going in the direction promised by the personal computing revolution back in the 1970s and 80s and is still capable of handling most people's current general computing needs. I write this hoping that other people like me who are reading this understand the importance of keeping hardware like this alive. this is what I believe as well,…

Interesting take! I hadn't considered that there could be an inversion where suddenly desktops are no longer commodity products. It got me thinking--something similar happened to digital cameras where all the cheap point and shoots were replaced by phones so that now standalone cameras are an expensive niche for photographers. OpenPOWER piggybacks off of IBM's high end POWER offerings, which are themselves part of a…

> I know people who spend more than I spent just on graphics cards every year

Could you make any assumption, how many such people exists? If this number enough to achieve some financial sustainability for manufacturer?

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#107

Post by sandwichbop »

frabre wrote: post #105
sandwichbop wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The bottom line is that this is the only hardware currently in production that is going in the direction promised by the personal computing revolution back in the 1970s and 80s and is still capable of handling most people's current general computing needs. I write this hoping that other people like me who are reading this understand the importance of keeping hardware like this alive. this is what I believe as well,…

Interesting take! I hadn't considered that there could be an inversion where suddenly desktops are no longer commodity products. It got me thinking--something similar happened to digital cameras where all the cheap point and shoots were replaced by phones so that now standalone cameras are an expensive niche for photographers. OpenPOWER piggybacks off of IBM's high end POWER offerings, which are themselves part of a…

>It got me thinking--something similar happened to digital cameras where all the cheap point and shoots were replaced by phones so that now standalone cameras are an expensive niche for photographers.

exactly, I think it'll be better now to settle in with OpenPOWER rather than later to not get caught off guard. This whole affordable PC era was a temporary illusion and we can't relie on vendors providing us mitigations since even those eventually cease. Personally I still can't afford a Raptor machine atm but I'm getting in by working on stuff in QEMU with the recommended openPOWER debian release

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#108

Post by frabre »

sandwichbop wrote: post #107
frabre wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting take! I hadn't considered that there could be an inversion where suddenly desktops are no longer commodity products. It got me thinking--something similar happened to digital cameras where all the cheap point and shoots were replaced by phones so that now standalone cameras are an expensive niche for photographers. OpenPOWER piggybacks off of IBM's high end POWER offerings, which are themselves part of a…

>It got me thinking--something similar happened to digital cameras where all the cheap point and shoots were replaced by phones so that now standalone cameras are an expensive niche for photographers. exactly, I think it'll be better now to settle in with OpenPOWER rather than later to not get caught off guard. This whole affordable PC era was a temporary illusion and we can't relie on vendors providing us mitigation…

Thought you might be interested in integricloud: https://www.integricloud.com/

You can get a base working power 9 VM running a lean linux or BSD for about $20/month.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#109

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

brucehoult wrote: post #70
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I follow your point. They're a vendor using POWER chips to provide blob-free computers. I'm fairly confident that they could make their own chips, but given that they'd need a fab and call it a billion dollars that's an impractical step up from building machines around existing chips. None of this constitutes them having "torched their own roadmap", just being stuck between a rock (their product being de…

When someone says "build their own chip" they do not in general mean to extract their own silicon ingots from sand, or to build their own fab. They mean to "tape out" their own SoC design and send it to a fab owner such as TSMC, Samsung, Intel for the physical manufacturing step. Apple does not own a fab. Arm does not own a fab. Qualcomm does not own a fab. I believe IBM does not own any modern fab (some built in ear…

Yes? When I said "they'd need a fab and call it a billion dollars" I meant they'd need the use of a fab, not that they'd have to own the factory themselves. I don't see how it matters anyways

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#110

Post by brucehoult »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #109
brucehoult wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When someone says "build their own chip" they do not in general mean to extract their own silicon ingots from sand, or to build their own fab. They mean to "tape out" their own SoC design and send it to a fab owner such as TSMC, Samsung, Intel for the physical manufacturing step. Apple does not own a fab. Arm does not own a fab. Qualcomm does not own a fab. I believe IBM does not own any modern fab (some built in ear…

Yes? When I said "they'd need a fab and call it a billion dollars" I meant they'd need the use of a fab, not that they'd have to own the factory themselves. I don't see how it matters anyways

I'm not sure where that billion dollars is going to go then.

SiFive has raised a total funding of $366M over 6 rounds and 9 years, which has been enough to give them leadership in the RISC-V ecosystem and a product range spanning virtually the entire range ARM's does -- from equivalents for Cortex-M0 (in fact lower) up to Cortex-X3 (and POWER9) for their latest core announced in October (P870, 18 SPECInt2l6/GHz).

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