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

IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

theregister.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 96 posts

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#41

Post by boot »

syncopate wrote: post #28
Millennium wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All three of the PS3/XBox360/Wii generation consoles used POWER-derived chips: very different chips, of course, but POWER all the same. The Wii U uses a POWER chip too. POWER stalled in the performance/watt category around the time of the Power Mac G5: unfortunate, since this was around the time that performance/watt was starting to be considered a real thing. That hurt the architecture's standing terribly. But it's…

Any ideas why PowerPCs stalled in performance? Is PowerPC really an architectural dead end?

My take is that it's all about the execution of creating a chip. x86 for example is a much worse ISA, but there is some research (no source on this assertion) that says at the end of the day it doesn't matter too much since the machinecode is just translated into some internal RISC code.

So, it isn't that PowerPC is doomed from a technical standpoint. Instead it's all about money, business cycle stuff. Less sales means less R&D. Less R&D means you fall behind of the competition. IBM doesn't really have the heavy hitters they used to in the chip business (Relative to Intel/ARM/TSMC). If you want the newest flashiest tech, you can't really use their fab - that sort of stuff.

Every chip technology node is getting more expensive for foundries, which means the chip market will likely naturally converge to a small number of players.

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#42

Post by neurotech1 »

bluedino wrote: post #19
spatulon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in automotive software, and PowerPC CPUs (albeit from Freescale and STMicroelectronics, not IBM) are more popular than ever. It's a very common choice for powertrain ECUs.

Big in avionics for some reason too. Wasn't it the F/22 which received an upgraded PPC that was in the news a while back?

The F-22 uses PowerPC processors in the upgraded Common Integrated Processor(CIP) avionics, partly for compatibility with the F-35 Integrated Core Processor (ICP) avionics.

F/A-18s also use PowerPC processors in the Advanced Mission Computer (AMC) avionics.

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#43

Post by Nelson69 »

dman wrote: post #29
Symmetry wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really just the standard Innovator's Dilemma effect where low-cost, high-volume products often tend to eat their way up the market. Now that the semi-RISC ARM processor is attacking Intel from the low end it's having the same sort of success as x86 did over MIPS, etc.

Next couple of years are going to be interesting. Intels been winning for so long that it seems that theyre immune to the innovators dilemna. Will be interesting to see if the arm platform will break into the mainstream of desktop / server computing or if Intel will prevail and have 80% of the desktop and mobile market.

How good is ARM at running just generic ARM binaries? There are all the custom hardware parts, we can ignore them, but can I build a 32bit ARM binary that will run on a wide range of ARM cores with good/great performance?

Historically, it has been my experience that pretty much all the non-x86 platforms the compiler and hardware specific optimizations tend to have a pretty dramatic impact. Intel just has so much code and existing code streams to factor in to their designs for new hardware. Maybe this has changed. It's a hard road if mismatched or non-hardware optimized binaries are slow and pokey and hardware specific optimized binaries are competitive. Come out with a great 64bit ARM core that can run nearly all ARM binaries with decent performance (clearly, excluding stuff that needs custom hardware..) and ARM could be pretty disruptive.

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#44

Post by aray »

gvb wrote: post #24

I'm not quite sure where the news is here. IBM has been licensing the architecture and cores for years (2007 is mentioned[1]). All I see in the actual announcement[2] is marketing hype (not news) about software that already exists ("open firmware" == U-Boot, "open software" == linux) and hardware that has been licensable for years. [1] http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Power_Architecture#Licensing [2] http://www-03.ibm.com…

Reading the press release, the firmware mentioned is neither das u boot (a bootloader) nor "open firmware" [1] a boot standard used by IBM's Power systems. It is the actual chip firmware, and this is the first I've ever heard of a silicon vendor doing this! I'm excited to see what the open source community will be able to do with it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#45

Post by jfb »

gngeal wrote: post #5
tommi wrote: post #2

"With its embedded Power chip business under assault from makers of ARM and x86 processors" I didn't know Power chip business still existed.

Of course it still exists. They're doing this now because they don't want to be steamrolled by the raging success that is the OpenSPARC project.

I laughed.

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#46

Post by AnthonyMouse »

astrodust wrote: post #11

I would love to see a Rasperry Pi type device with a PPC chip on it, a 603e equivalent for example, or even better, a 7400 series "G4" chip.

FWIW: http://www.ebay.com/sch/Desktops-AllInOnes-/171957/i.html?_s...

Costs more than the Raspberry Pi though.

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#47

Post by duaneb »

gvb wrote: post #24

I'm not quite sure where the news is here. IBM has been licensing the architecture and cores for years (2007 is mentioned[1]). All I see in the actual announcement[2] is marketing hype (not news) about software that already exists ("open firmware" == U-Boot, "open software" == linux) and hardware that has been licensable for years. [1] http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Power_Architecture#Licensing [2] http://www-03.ibm.com…

ARM is an "open" architecture—it's fairly easy to roll your own if you have an FPGA and patience to read through arch specifications for a couple months. I would be highly surprised if you could get equivalent documentation for POWER without a significant bit of cash. Not that I blame them, even open standards can cost a couple hundred.

I don't think this would change anything, though, there's not enough gain to justify an architecture switch for either hardware or software people. And that's a damn shame. I cut my teeth on PowerPC and I couldn't imagine a better way, it's a beautiful architecture. Altivec STILL makes intel's vector processing look like a toy.

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#49

Post by pbsd »

boot wrote: post #41
syncopate wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any ideas why PowerPCs stalled in performance? Is PowerPC really an architectural dead end?

My take is that it's all about the execution of creating a chip. x86 for example is a much worse ISA, but there is some research (no source on this assertion) that says at the end of the day it doesn't matter too much since the machinecode is just translated into some internal RISC code. So, it isn't that PowerPC is doomed from a technical standpoint. Instead it's all about money, business cycle stuff. Less sales mea…

I believe you're thinking of this [1].

[1] http://research.cs.wisc.edu/vertical/papers/2013/hpca13-isa-...

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#50

Post by wmf »

duaneb wrote: post #47
gvb wrote: post #24

I'm not quite sure where the news is here. IBM has been licensing the architecture and cores for years (2007 is mentioned[1]). All I see in the actual announcement[2] is marketing hype (not news) about software that already exists ("open firmware" == U-Boot, "open software" == linux) and hardware that has been licensable for years. [1] http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Power_Architecture#Licensing [2] http://www-03.ibm.com…

ARM is an "open" architecture—it's fairly easy to roll your own if you have an FPGA and patience to read through arch specifications for a couple months. I would be highly surprised if you could get equivalent documentation for POWER without a significant bit of cash. Not that I blame them, even open standards can cost a couple hundred. I don't think this would change anything, though, there's not enough gain to just…

https://www.power.org/documentation/power-isa-version-2-07/

BTW, if you want to roll your own ARM you have to negotiate for an architectural license.

Post reply on HN