Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#71

Post by Pet_Ant » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 8:36 AM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#72

Post by NikkiA » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 8:51 AM UTC

I'd prefer to buy a theoretical open-source R8000-R12000 based board*, but the only 'open source MIPS' stuff I ever see are low end R4000 and R5000 microcontrollers.

* Yours sincerely one of the few people that isn't offended by delay slots.

edit: and yes, Loongson is on my radar, has been for a while, but again only ever see microcontrollers rather than general purpose computing motherboards.

another edit: looks like loongson-3 3A5000 and 7A2000 boards and mini-PCs are starting to become reasonably affordable, so my dream may be reality in the nearish future.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#73

Post by rcbdev » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 9:14 AM UTC

There's a group of Italians who are well on their way to release a commercial Open Hardware PowerPC notebook, for all that's worth: https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/de/

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#74

Post by rollcat » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 10:09 AM UTC

danielheath wrote: post #51

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?

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.

This right here, it's just crazy. On one project we invested in a private cache of prebuilt/binary pip wheels, as much as it complicated the build and maintenance, it saved us so much time and effort in the long run, and was ultimately a productivity boost.

I really like it that the x86 monoculture is being disrupted, and enjoy the benefits of low-wattage high-performance systems, but we still have a long way to go.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#75

Post by stephenr » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 10:36 AM UTC

danielheath wrote: post #51

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?

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.

For the vast, vast majority of cases a VM can solve the issue of developing for linux/arm on an arm Mac.

It doesn't help so much if your Mac is still Intel based, admittedly.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#76

Post by RustyRussell » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 11:00 AM UTC

nyrikki wrote: post #13

Hardware Decimal floating point is very useful, both for legacy and new financial systems and some numerical problems you need improved stability on.

Dropped in the latest Power chips I believe.

I had a friend who worked on it: he called it simply "decimal floating" because there was no point :)

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#77

Post by RustyRussell » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 11:09 AM UTC

Despite the brilliant work by some IBM engineers (much from my ex-colleagues at OzLabs) there was no strategy to get commodity Open power. Even opening up was more a "throw over the wall" rather than a sustained effort.

Developing a proper Linux little-endian ABI was a major engineering feat, across kernel and toolchain, but nobody understood what to do with it.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#78

Post by Findecanor » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 12:42 PM UTC

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?

RISC-V's success has been mostly in small embedded systems — where a POWER chip would be overkill or unsuitable. The core ISA is very small, thus cheap, and then extensible. The design even encourages proprietary extensions. Then it has grown from there as ISA extensions have been ratified.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#79

Post by api » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 1:37 PM UTC

cameron_b wrote: post #52

api wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure if you are counting cache misses or optimizing for a specific compute unit. Few people do that outside of AI, crypto, AV codecs, simulation, etc. If you are doing that you may need to specialize per arch anyway because you’re probably using vector units.

I was speaking to whether the code will work. The answer is almost always yes. Optimizations at a higher level such as algorithm choice or where allocations are performed also are architecture neutral. This is most optimization.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

#80

Post by spicykraken » Fri, Feb 09, 2024, 3:31 PM UTC

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?

Unfortunately so, native modules for Node are starting to be written more and more in rust rollup and parcel are two examples. Unlike previous modules written in C++ if there's no prebuilt binary for your platform, they won't even try to build locally, just flat-out wont install despite building fine if you do it all manually.