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Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#51

Post by danielheath »

bluedino wrote: post #48
treffer wrote: post #42

OpenPOWER happened a few years after Apple finished the transition to Intel. The whole architecture is niche since then. Linus Torvalds has a very interesting POV why x86 won. "Develop at home" issues. You are going to deploy to a system that is similar to what you built on. If you run x86 then you'll deploy to x86. And he points to that as the reason for x86 servers. Home is today a x86 or arm computer (arm if you l…

Today we deploy to the cloud and work on Arm/x86 Do most web developers do things that have issues being cross platform?

There are _so many_ deploy issues surfaced by eg developing on a mac and deploying to linux/aarch64 (or, in my case, developing on x86 linux). Anytime you add a dependency on a package with a native component you're likely to have something to fix.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#52

Post by cameron_b »

api wrote: post #50
bluedino wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today we deploy to the cloud and work on Arm/x86 Do most web developers do things that have issues being cross platform?

Even modern C and C++ code generally ports just fine as long as you avoid things with unspecified behavior like exotic casts and weird pointer tricks. Have to watch endianness too but that doesn’t actually come up all that often. Also AFAIK there are no longer any big-endian architectures in common use. Newer languages are even easier. Rust and Go almost always port with zero issues. Obviously the same goes for scrip…

If you’re higher up the stack, sure. If you want performance, you want to keep the dev/prod environment alike so that you can properly optimize

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#53

Post by ithkuil »

SpecialistK wrote: post #20

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.

Iirc OpenPOWER predates RISC-V by two years

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#54

Post by KerrAvon »

johnklos wrote: post #37
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…

I would completely seriously buy that hypothetical POWER SBC immediately.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#56

Post by brucehoult »

ilc wrote: post #38
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;).

> RISC-V, when announced was a small ISA

It still is today, comparatively.

RV32I/RV64I are very very small ISAs. RV64G is pretty small -- comparable to, say, MC68010, and a lot simpler than i386.

These small subsets will be supported by the ecosystem forever, for those who want to use them. They will also remain, unchanged, at the heart of more complex standards such as RVA23 and successors, and make up most of the instructions in programs.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#57

Post by StillBored »

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.

Depends on your market. If you want a high end server/workstation class processor then openPOWER absolutely has an advantage because they have a shipping product that is (somewhat) competitive in that arena and despite the risc-v promises the products look like early 2010 era arm server machines. OpenPOWER have 30+ years of instruction set and architectural tuning to fall back on, and that is nothing to sneeze at if you actually want good vector perf, a stable toolchain, or a roadmap that doesn't depend on VC's staying in the game.

On the other hand if you looking for a small embedded one off solution then sure, risc-v. But unless your already sold on risc-v, there are a lot of other competitors in that space which have such a huge breadth of product offerings that it might be hard to justify a risc-v solution solely based on the processor architecture.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#58

Post by snvzz »

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…

>and then decided I'd had enough fighting the software ecosystem.

And by all indications, such ecosystem is now never going to take off.

In contrast, RISC-V is rapidly growing the strongest ecosystem.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#59

Post by snvzz »

_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…

>no ECC

Please no. ECC is a must.

Not having ECC being common is an abnormal, bad situation to fix, rather than preferred.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#60

Post by [deleted] »

KerrAvon wrote: post #54
johnklos wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would completely seriously buy that hypothetical POWER SBC immediately.

[deleted]
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