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.
IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
51–60 of 96 posts
Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any ideas why PowerPCs stalled in performance? Is PowerPC really an architectural dead end?
I think it's truer to say that PowerPC stalled in performance per watt. The high end Power7/Power8 chips are massively powerful but that comes with Power and Cooling requirements that aren't going to work in a laptop.
Those post-date the G5 by several years, though. Things had gotten better for POWER by then, but it had already lost much of its market.
Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> BTW, if you want to roll your own ARM you have to negotiate for an architectural license.
I would hope not for a personal FPGA... that's hilariously unenforcable.
Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
any particular reason? error rate, power use, ?
General Motors was a big user of Motorola 68k variants. Workstations and personal computers that used the 680x0 series switched to the Power series, maybe the developers just find them easier to migrate to.
Personally I've just found the architecture clean and well-designed. Even if this only helps the developers I'd say it's worth it.
Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
#55"With its embedded Power chip business under assault from makers of ARM and x86 processors" I didn't know Power chip business still existed.
ARM chips outsell x86 chips by at least a factor of two, and I'm pretty sure more than that. For each Intel desktop/laptop there are twenty ARM chips in microwaves, cars and airplanes. In the beginning it had a lot to do with toolchain support, these days I think it's a combination of force of habit and the fact that you can fry an egg on an x86 floating point unit.
From what I know of the space, ARM is not used very much at all in cars or aviation. These are both areas where PowerPC dominates. I'd guess most modern cars have at least a dozen PowerPC chips.
And both ARM and PowerPC outsel x86 by a hell of a lot more than a factor of 2. It's at least a factor of 10, and that's almost certainly low too. x86, in terms of units sold, is an extremely small market.
Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
#56"With its embedded Power chip business under assault from makers of ARM and x86 processors" I didn't know Power chip business still existed.
They still show up in HPC systems from time to time. It's a nice architecture.
From time to time? So 5 out of the top 10 on the top500 is from time to time?
Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like a Tyan whitebox with Power8 processors, Nvidia GPUs, and Mellanox NICs running Linux. Might be good for HPC.
Probably will cost $50,000 and run as fast a new smartphone...
Don't worry, you can pay $1,000/day to unlock a new core when you need the power of two smartphones.
Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
#58"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.
Some of us had m88k systems (not bad actually) and 88open helped that architecture take over the world. It even merits two whole sentences at wikipedia! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/88open
Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It is the execution that counts. The world could use a third mass architecture. Especially one that is not too tightly IP locked. The whole web 0.1, 1.0,2.0 came from the fact that PC clones were everywhere.
> The whole web 0.1, 1.0,2.0 came from the fact that PC clones were everywhere
I was there and it didn't! TBL did development on Next. There were some text mode browsers that worked on Unix only. The popular graphical browser was Mosaic[1] which started out as Unix/X windows only. It was run on Sun, HP, IBM, SGI etc workstations (32 bit).
At that time popular Windows was still 16 bit. It didn't even include TCP/IP with various third party stacks (for a price) and later a Microsoft stack for Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Some brave people did start porting Mosaic but it was hard because a completely different GUI API and semantics was needed, as well as dealing with the cramped machines compared to the 32 bit workstations. It was late 1994 before these ports became somewhat usable.
Netscape was formed around then, and the big difference was they made their code portable to multiple guis from the very beginning (a lot easier than retrofitting it). By 1995 every platform had to have TCP/IP and a web browser to be relevant. The web spread because no one was in charge, and everything had to work everywhere on a wide variety of screen sizes, operating systems and user environments.
ie it was the diversity of systems out there that was the cause, not that you could buy the PC architecture from different companies.
Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla
#60Earlier 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?
Intel opened a CPU design facility down the street from Motorola's PowerPC operation and bought away key parts of the team in '98-'99 setting Motorola back enough that they could no longer be ahead in the horse race. (For years, PPC had beaten Intel in some categories when the new PPC architectures came out, then Intel would pull ahead until the next generation. Apple always found something good to put on a Keynote slide. After the brain drain that wasn't going to happen.)