Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 113 posts

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#61

Post by snvzz »

brucehoult wrote: post #43
MassPikeMike wrote: post #35

One very interesting project built on OpenPOWER, but with unique vector extensions, is LibreSOC, https://libre-soc.org/ . It promises to be fully open hardware as well.

I have very low confidence that it will ever be anything but vapour, given the project leader's previous record e.g. this project fully funded in August 2016 and not yet delivered 7 1/2 years later. https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop The project updates (last one in 2020) are painful to read. A competent outfit such as Pine64 or Sipeed can knock a project like this out in 6 months. They could have been…

Before the micro-desktop, that person was also involved in some KDE/Plasma tablet, which also never shipped.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#62

Post by genmud »

Nobody cares about it because unless you use IBM, or use it in some embedded use cases it’s irrelevant.

It’s irrelevant because while they would openly license it, it wasn’t open source as you think about it traditionally and would require you to cross license derived technology to the consortium, which was effectively Freescale and IBM if I recall correctly.

IIRC they have only recently open sourced and freely licensed the ISA. Even then, there isn’t much interest in it outside big iron or niche platforms.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#64

Post by brucehoult »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #44
wmf wrote: post #4

It's crazy expensive, Raptor torched their own roadmap, and no one actually needs what they're selling. (People say they do, but 99% of those people haven't actually bought it.)

> Raptor torched their own roadmap I don't think that's a fair summary; Raptor has a very specific product, more or less the selling point of which is 100% open and auditable systems, so when IBM came out with POWER10 that bakes blobs into the system they're stuck with completely switching course. That's not torching anything, it's them being forced to correct for external factors.

But they're free to design and build their own chips without such blobs, right?

Right?

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#65

Post by brucehoult »

ithkuil wrote: post #53
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

The OpenPOWER Consortium was created in August 2013, more than three years after the RISC-V design effort started, but yes two years before the RISC-V Foundation was created and the then current ISA draft was widely publicised.

As far as I understand, at that point your only freedom was to license IBMs core or chip designs.

IBM released their first open source POWER core, the "Microwatt", in August 2019, a month after the base RISC-V 32/64 IMAFDC ISA was ratified (frozen forever and published)

The cores used in the highest performance RISC-V SoCs currently available were announced in October 2018 (SiFive U74) and July 2019 (THead C910).

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#66

Post by awilfox »

I care deeply, and was one of the early adopters of the Talos. I do my graphics and design work on an iMac G5, still. Power is the hill I'm willing to die on, technologically speaking. The bi-endianness matters a lot to me. I prefer to do my development on BE, and I get hardware accelerated LE VMs for free on Power.

But the rest of this thread is correct: right now it is a huge cost sink. I recommend people buy Apple Silicon Macs for new hardware unless they really need the owner controlled firmware of a Talos. There's just no denying the M2/M3 spank the Power9 core in every bench, single and multi thread.

I'm eternally optimistic - I was told I was crazy in the dark days of P7 and P8, then the Talos came. Maybe the LibreSoC or PPC Notebook projects deliver? Maybe Talos 3 isn't stupid high cost? I hope, but I don't hold my breath.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#67

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

brucehoult wrote: post #64
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Raptor torched their own roadmap I don't think that's a fair summary; Raptor has a very specific product, more or less the selling point of which is 100% open and auditable systems, so when IBM came out with POWER10 that bakes blobs into the system they're stuck with completely switching course. That's not torching anything, it's them being forced to correct for external factors.

But they're free to design and build their own chips without such blobs, right? Right?

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 decent performance blob-free computers) and a hard place (needing to source CPUs).

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#68

Post by dingi »

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?

I've encountered a couple of NPM packages with native components which didn't work on a M series MacBook. Languages that uses native libs as part of their own packages are still a risk to do multi arch development/deployment.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#69

Post by devl547 »

_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.

Elbrus are VLIW/EPIC, based on home-grown architecture.

The SPARC-based one is the old MCST R1000.

>who would be willing to fab it

Before the conflict, they used TSMC. Now, AFAIK, the only fab available is Mikron, located in Zelenograd near Moscow. And only 90nm process. There were some rumors about switching to SMIC, but I have not heard any updates for quite some time.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#70

Post by brucehoult »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #67
brucehoult wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they're free to design and build their own chips without such blobs, right? Right?

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 early 2000s, yes).

Post reply on HN