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Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#31

Post by ensignavenger »

_chu1 wrote: post #19
ensignavenger wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting! The article says windows XP and 7, which are pretty old and unsupported now. But it is a very interesting approach.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#32

Post by SpecialistK »

_chu1 wrote: post #29
SpecialistK wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't deny that it's possible, but I think it's unlikely. The introduction of AMD SoCs like the Steam Deck and Z1 suggest that a portable Xbox is possible with much less overhead than switching ISA (again) I'm not even sure if the performance race is going to endure - Sony continues to hold the home console crown, Nintendo prints money with their hugely outdated Switch, and Microsoft appear to be pivoting to publis…

I think a relatively substantial issue with swapping ISA is the software library, which is what's kept Intel in business all these years. Older/retro games is a large part of gaming, and being able to play 15+ year old PC games easily with a single download and no kajoogling is a major 1-up for the Steam Deck, especially when some games have better compatibility under Wine than Windows 11. The Xbox Series consoles ar…

I believe the issue with backwards compatibility was licensing, especially for games like JSRF that Phil Spencer explicitly wanted to add.

The 360 games I've played BC on a Bone have downloaded the whole game onto disk, even with the original DVD in the drive so I'm not sure how much they're changing behind the scenes.

Regardless, I share the sentiment that running everything on Microsoft's infrastructure is a troubling trend. I like xCloud for managing JRPG inventory on the bus, or demoing a game before I commit to the full download, but it's no replacement for local gaming and it shouldn't be pushed as such.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#33

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #22

OpenPOWER has no advantages over RISC-V. The performance is going to be the same given the same level of investment into the silicon design. These are just ISAs, and a lot more goes into CPU design to make them fast.

It's possible that OpenPOWER has no advantages today, but I remain curious how we got here; my understanding is that POWER and SPARC both had open source versions before RISC-V was created, so why didn't those get picked up but RISC-V did?

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#34

Post by inkyoto »

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.

> Perhaps it didn't have atomics at that point? That would've killed it for that project.

That would have been PPC 601 and perhaps [entry level] 603 models. Motorola/IBM first released a single processor PPC, then they added support for multiprocessor systems which did have atomics – https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180814-00/?p=99...

Other than that, I immensely enjoyed hand writing PPC assembly – it is a very straightforward RISC design, the «rlwinm» / «rlwimi» instructions are fun – once you figure out how to use them.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#36

Post by MisterTea »

> 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 unknown reasons. So there is risk involved too, no one else is making these boards.

The performance gaps and architectural features that made these chips matter 20 years ago have been closed by commodity off the shelf x86 hardware and various Arm CPU's are eating everything.

The only reason Risc-V matters is that no one has to pay for licenses.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#37

Post by johnklos »

E39M5S62 wrote: post #16

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…

This. There are no inexpensive Power SBCs like we have for ARM and RISC-V. Heck, even MIPS has ways to buy and run inexpensively (I run NetBSD on Ubiquiti Edgerouter hardware, for instance).

If we could have a low end, quad core 2 GHz Power SBC with 4 gigs for $80 and a microATX motherboard with 16 cores at, say, around 4.5 GHz for under $500, the ecosystem would be VASTLY different.

Right now, all of my PowerPC work is on an old 1.5 GHz PowerPC G4 Mac mini and on an even older first generation iMac upgraded with a 600 MHz PowerPC G3. It'd be nice to have new hardware that didn't cost more than a decked out Ryzen 7950X3D system.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#38

Post by ilc »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #33
phendrenad2 wrote: post #22

OpenPOWER has no advantages over RISC-V. The performance is going to be the same given the same level of investment into the silicon design. These are just ISAs, and a lot more goes into CPU design to make them fast.

It's possible that OpenPOWER has no advantages today , but I remain curious how we got here; my understanding is that POWER and SPARC both had open source versions before RISC-V was created, so why didn't those get picked up but RISC-V did?

SPARC is a neat ISA, but the concept at the core: register windows, did not take off.

OpenPOWER: It may have to do with the size of the ISA when it started to be open.

RISC-V, when announced was a small ISA. That means making chips is easier.

It could just be the new hawtness effect. Look at how many people use NoSQL when SQL would work just fine ;).

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#39

Post by alfalfasprout »

E39M5S62 wrote: post #16

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…

This. And that extends to the datacenter too.

So, why spend all the time improving compiler outputs for a platform that doesn't have that much traction or perceived potential?

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#40

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

_chu1 wrote: post #15

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 bina…

> 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.

And, N=1, for all that I'm default-interested in new / less common CPU options, RISC-V only recently became really interesting with the availability decent-enough Linux-capable hardware <$100. This especially matters when it's competing against a plethora of sub-$100 ARM SBCs.

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