41–50 of 69 posts
Raptor starts at around $3800 and goes way up. Been dreaming about one of those for a long time.
My workstation now costs about $16.000 (And they dont feature the Power10 yet)
That website is a trainwreck on mobile firefox. Two screen-covering popups and wrong language detection.
I would be happy with an affordable Power10 workstation. I want that more than ARM or RISCV. Raptor starts at around $3800 and goes way up. Been dreaming about one of those for a long time. My workstation now costs about $16.000 (And they dont feature the Power10 yet)
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> open/libre/trustworthy potential It's not just potential but actual: Those Raptor workstations and servers already have coreboot firmware and run Linux (and whatever BSDs run on PPC today.)
Agreed for current , over recent years. But what about near-future , with multiple sources of performant RISC-V CPUs? And will a larger variety of boards follow, possibly including very libre ones like Raptor does for Power?
I used to think that current RISC-V offers are approximately in the ARM A57 league.
Using PPC in a laptop form factor is a really confusing choice, given that Apple abandoned PPC [1] in their laptops for Intel because they judged that there was no way that IBM was ever going to come out with a PPC chip that was ever going to be as power efficient as the comparable Intel parts. Their "Why PPC" page [2] makes no mention of power or thermal efficiency, and just states that PowerPC is better because the…
What's even more confusing is their choice of parts. The NXP QorIQ line is designed for use in networking hardware, not in mobile devices -- it has limited power management functionality, and, as best I was able to tell when I looked into this last year [2], has idle power consumption somewhere around 7W, ramping up to 20W under load. It's not especially fast, either -- it's only got four cores at 1.8 GHz. Most new c…
Otherwise picking an Intel or AMD part would be much more efficient from many angles.
Using PPC in a laptop form factor is a really confusing choice, given that Apple abandoned PPC [1] in their laptops for Intel because they judged that there was no way that IBM was ever going to come out with a PPC chip that was ever going to be as power efficient as the comparable Intel parts. Their "Why PPC" page [2] makes no mention of power or thermal efficiency, and just states that PowerPC is better because the…
I wouldn't think that PowerPC is ill suited for reasonably low power designs. It is a RISC chip after all. And up to and including the G4, they ran very well in the Apple laptops. Only the IBM-made G5 was a very hot beast, perhaps because it pushed the cpu frequency beyond the comfort zone for its process in the attempt to keep up with Intel. But a fresh design with a modern process could yield very low power and sti…
Somehow they power nearly 100% of mobile phones, and various other mobile devices.
cant donate in crypto, too bad
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I figure someone might as well go whole-hog on that and build a PC with just a big ol' FPGA.
FPGAs are incredibly closed, outside of Lattice Semiconductor's tiny FPGAs (unsuitable for computers). In all practicality for "openness", any open-source advocate should rather use Intel/AMD than Xilinx/Altera. Closed-source synthesizers, closed source bootup, closed source loaders, etc. etc. You're pretty much trusting the FPGA software more than any CPU.
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How would binary blobs work on a different architecture regardless of endian-ness?
htonl and ntohl would like a word.
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What's even more confusing is their choice of parts. The NXP QorIQ line is designed for use in networking hardware, not in mobile devices -- it has limited power management functionality, and, as best I was able to tell when I looked into this last year [2], has idle power consumption somewhere around 7W, ramping up to 20W under load. It's not especially fast, either -- it's only got four cores at 1.8 GHz. Most new c…
Indeed, they must have decided on the Power architecture first, because it's available and can run without proprietary binary blobs. That was the key consideration, I think. Otherwise picking an Intel or AMD part would be much more efficient from many angles.
Which isn't even necessarily true. The POWER architecture is just an ISA. It doesn't specify anything about how the rest of the system works.
(The POWER Architecture Platform does exist, but, as far as I know, it's only used in IBM's POWER servers.)
Conversely, it's hardly as though POWER is the only architecture this is true of. Coincidentally, NXP also sells a line of ARM SoCs (the i.MX line) which can be used in a blob-free mode, and there are already several open hardware laptops built around those parts!