is there something I'm missing? why does no one seem to care about OpenPOWER
I pre-ordered a Blackbird motherboard and 32 thread CPU and got it in 2019. I used it as my main workstation until 2022 and then decided I'd had enough fighting the software ecosystem. I still have the machine because I've regretted selling other odd hardware in the past ... especially my dual 133mhz BeBox.
If we could have a low end, quad core 2 GHz Power SBC with 4 gigs for $80 and a microATX motherboard with 16 cores at, say, around 4.5 GHz for under $500, the ecosystem would be VASTLY different.
Right now, all of my PowerPC work is on an old 1.5 GHz PowerPC G4 Mac mini and on an even older first generation iMac upgraded with a 600 MHz PowerPC G3. It'd be nice to have new hardware that didn't cost more than a decked out Ryzen 7950X3D system.
And by all indications, such ecosystem is now never going to take off.
In contrast, RISC-V is rapidly growing the strongest ecosystem.
So, why spend all the time improving compiler outputs for a platform that doesn't have that much traction or perceived potential?
I find it more performant than the kind of ARM hardware I think you're referring to, and more satisfying to use. I'd probably buy it again if mine died.
* Firefox didn't have a Javascript JIT. That made using Grafana, GCP Console, etc, basically impossible in my browser of choice.
* Closed source Electron applications (Teams, Slack, etc) weren't able to run natively, and the browser solution worked poorly for me.
* I was using Void Linux PPC, a one-man fork of Void Linux. I decided that the bus factor was too high, and since I wasn't willing to switch distributions, I had to switch back to x86_64. This proved to be a good decision, because shortly after I switched, the maintainer of Void Linux PPC announced that he was stopping maintenance to work on Chimera Linux.
There were other little things that accumulated to create enough mental pressure to abandon it as a daily driver. It's fantastically neat hardware, and in my experience utterly reliable. I can't think of a single machine crash I had in the entire three years I used it daily. It can and does work well for plenty of people - it just wasn't quite right for me.
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 like Apple), perhaps some SBCs (usually arm, perhaps some mips), and some IOT (often esps, so xtensa / risc-v) plus some router/wifi device (arm).
RISC-V is scaling up on that axis. It is killing other ecosystems for embedded/iot. It's becoming useful for SBCs and low end desktop boards are on the horizon.
That's the scaling path that works. You are $20 away from trying it out. And it can scale all the way to an affordable desktop soon (Milk-V).
It's IMHO not "a lot of energy on RISC-V", it's a quickly growing user base. OpenPOWER lost that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqUtGk0DHbQ
And that's a genuine $9, as in you can buy 10 or 1000 if you want, unlike the "$5" Pi Zero which was one per order, plus shipping. (It has a genuine, higher, price recently, and the Pi Zero 2 is a great deal if you want a low end Arm board).
And yes, the Oasis looks very promising, hopefully this year.
Do most web developers do things that have issues being cross platform?
Newer languages are even easier. Rust and Go almost always port with zero issues. Obviously the same goes for scripting and VM based languages like Java.
The architecture matters less than it used to.
This actually made me hold off on spending $10k on a computer that's last-generation technology. I suspect I'm not alone - a lot of interest in OpenPOWER is probably waiting for Power11 and Talos III or whatever permutation that can ship a real product that isn't 5+ years old.
https://www.talospace.com/2023/10/the-next-raptor-openpower-...
[ The next Raptor OpenPOWER systems are coming, but they won't be Power10 ] ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963941 )
[0] [ In the future even your RAM will have firmware; and the subject of POWER10 blobs ] ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26029798 )
It's what, $6000 for the 4-core, 8GB memory entry level model?
I know it isn't that insane considering what new and used POWER servers cost, but also is anyone using these who isn't locked into AIX or IBM i? Is there any real reason to use POWER when priced against commodity AMD64 machines?
Perhaps it is because IBM and Oracle exercise too much control over their architectures making it hard for a community to develop around them? Perhaps it is something in the licensing? Perhaps more fundamental problems with the design of the other instruction sets, making RISC-V easier a better base to improve on?
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.
RISC-V built a lot of traction very fast and was affordable and is now starting to be competitive with ARM, so it has different circumstances around it.
There's a group developing a POWER based laptop with a quad-core NXP processor, I've been watching them since 2020 and they've made some pretty good progress. It even has an MXM3 slot for adding a dedicated video card.
Please no. ECC is a must.
Not having ECC being common is an abnormal, bad situation to fix, rather than preferred.
What I've seen from that project in the past does not fill me with confidence, and nothing I've seen since has changed that impression. Even if the project results in working hardware (which is uncertain), its performance is unlikely to be on par with expectations.
Previous discussions:
And, N=1, for all that I'm default-interested in new / less common CPU options, RISC-V only recently became really interesting with the availability decent-enough Linux-capable hardware <$100. This especially matters when it's competing against a plethora of sub-$100 ARM SBCs.
I haven't kept up, but competition from AMD, ARM and RISC-V all probably fit that need now.
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 subcontracted given the $234k raised.
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.
Apple dumped it because the G5 was not going to work in a laptop, and if it couldn't beat x86 in that space, then the M1 has closed that door forever.
The Cell was an innovative design, but an AMD core and an ATI GPU on the same die was an onslaught that IBM wasn't going to survive.
ARM has been the top supercomputer, and it runs in tiny things. The pervasiveness that it has came at the expense of architectures that were not as flexible.
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.
Right?
<insert Padme meme>
Developing a proper Linux little-endian ABI was a major engineering feat, across kernel and toolchain, but nobody understood what to do with it.
* 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.
I'm not even sure if the performance race is going to endure - Sony continues to hold the home console crown, Nintendo prints money with their hugely outdated Switch, and Microsoft appear to be pivoting to publishing more than a console exclusivity race they will probably never win ("going Sega")
As you said, the future of x86 isn't guaranteed, but if I were calling shots I'd look at Arm designs with embedded graphics like Exynos and Snapdragon before trying to build a fully custom design based on POWER and graphics from elsewhere (probably still AMD, and that single-source has been compelling enough to adopt even while the CPU performance was lackluster)
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).
May be blame it on IBM again. Personally I quite like OpenPOWER.
PS while I prize and want open hardware I really doubt it can really be auditable at hw level, at least for most owners, even if technically well skilled. Projects of a certain size can be known only if they are FLOSS from the first SLoC in a way a spread community born around them, knowing them from the start and passing knowledge.
OpenPOWER: It may have to do with the size of the ISA when it started to be open.
RISC-V, when announced was a small ISA. That means making chips is easier.
It could just be the new hawtness effect. Look at how many people use NoSQL when SQL would work just fine ;).
On the other hand if you looking for a small embedded one off solution then sure, risc-v. But unless your already sold on risc-v, there are a lot of other competitors in that space which have such a huge breadth of product offerings that it might be hard to justify a risc-v solution solely based on the processor architecture.
In the meantime I have tried to do some work with QEMU but I ran in to some snag in understanding exactly how "hypervisor" mode works according to the POWER9 manual. It has some confusing conditions about hypervisor mode and managing the page table, I had tried to join the IBM mailing list for openpower and had asked to see if someone could explain how the hypervisor mode worked more comprehensively, but got nothing back. Of course there really isn't a wealth of information to help me figure this out the otherwise.
I say this because both of these were symptoms of the same problem. POWER is really not hobbyist friendly, both in investment cost and in support. There just isn't enough of an ecosystem in my experience.
This is for people who want IBM + total auditability? Who have severe commitments to the ecosystem already?
Perhaps it didn't have atomics at that point? That would've killed it for that project.
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 unknown reasons. So there is risk involved too, no one else is making these boards.
The performance gaps and architectural features that made these chips matter 20 years ago have been closed by commodity off the shelf x86 hardware and various Arm CPU's are eating everything.
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.
* 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.
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.
I had a friend who worked on it: he called it simply "decimal floating" because there was no point :)
From my own point of view, I'm willing to spend a $$$$ premium on hardware where I can have assurances that from the time I boot it, only code I authorize to run is run. Where every part of the system has code that, at least in principle, I or someone else could audit and fix. People have valuable IP stored on computers and it's worth much more than a few thousand dollars.
If you just look at price to performance, you are missing the point. Also, the price is not out of line with other niche desktops such as Apple's or System76.
There's not a lot of competition in this niche. The previous system that was useful was a ASUS KGPE-D16 motherboard, which could be librebooted (https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/kgpe-d16.html) I expect something new to come along in this space every 5-10 years.
For my purposes, I haven't fought with the software ecosystem, and was able to compile the very few packages that weren't already precompiled.
Here are some developments I think are worth noting:
* There is a libre driver for the onboard NIC. (https://github.com/meklort/bcm5719-fw) This seems to be the only project that cares about blobs in every part of the board.
* Dasharo https://www.dasharo.com/ providing alternative boot firmware.
* Artic Tern, (https://www.raptorcs.com/content/AT1PC2/intro.html) which is objectively still mostly a development platform (that if you're skilled you can get to work) provides a completely libre boot environment and the possibility of controlling other peripherals using only auditable code.
A few things have not yet made it onto the board:
* Flexver (https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/documentation/flexve...) which would allow for verifying and auditing hardware, firmware and the boot process isn't commercially available yet.
* Ultravisor state enabling more secure VMs is still awaiting implementation AFAIK. (https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Power_ISA/Privilege_States#Ul...)
* I'm not aware of a lot of hardware that would take advantage of IBM CAPI 2.0 IO accelleration. Perhaps someone has some information on this.
* I'm not sure what the status of transactional memory is, but I'm not aware of it being used in software. Perhaps someone can enlighten me on this.
These would be nice to have, and I hope to have them in the future.
The bottom line is that this is the only hardware currently in production that is going in the direction promised by the personal computing revolution back in the 1970s and 80s and is still capable of handling most people's current general computing needs. I write this hoping that other people like me who are reading this understand the importance of keeping hardware like this alive.
this is what I believe as well, too many people on HN seem to be lose grasp of the big picture in favor of a few dollars today. (but the big picture can only go so far i.e. Keynes's "In the long run we are all dead"). BUT the big issue that I fear many people are overlooking is the post-PC era. I made a thread on g the other day but didn't get much traction there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-PC_era I believe home computing will become more expensive and progress slows down as traditional businesses and "gamers" that currently fuel that affordability dry up and economies of scale inverts. Things like Talos and OpenPOWER will remain more stable in my opinion as they already priced in these niche market demands unlike other archs that seem to depend on a big net of users that every day is growing smaller as people migrate to cloud only solutions. I think it's advantageous to invest into OpenPOWER as an eccosystem even if RISC-V picks up since there's already big dollars behind it that doesn't depend on scraping the bottom of the barrel for funding. I plan to write this up with actual numbers some other day, maybe estimate a sort of timeline when this might start happening
It got me thinking--something similar happened to digital cameras where all the cheap point and shoots were replaced by phones so that now standalone cameras are an expensive niche for photographers.
OpenPOWER piggybacks off of IBM's high end POWER offerings, which are themselves part of a big enterprise market for scientific and financial computing. The OpenPOWER derivatives use IBM's POWER 8/9 chips.
I started looking for an alternative to commodity desktops when news came out that there were ring 0/-1/-2/-3 vulnerabilities in chips and I realized I had no idea what code was running on my computer. A lot of people just applied the mitigations and shrugged like it was perfectly normal that they couldn't really control their own computers.
When Raptor came out with their offerings, I thought it was great: full ownership of my computer, and as an added bonus some premium IBM chips from another architecture. I know people who spend more than I spent just on graphics cards every year.
