Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?
I see a lot of energy around RISC-V but I never see anything similar for OpenPOWER, on paper it seems like the dream machine with actual performance like the Talos Workstations albeit a bit expensive but this sounds incredible
https://www.raptorcs.com/content/TL2PA1/intro.html
>Designed with a fully owner-controlled CPU domain, you can audit and modify any portion of the open source firmware on the Talos™ II mainboard, all the way down to the CPU microcode.
is there something I'm missing? why does no one seem to care about OpenPOWER
112 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadThis 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.
I think x86 also has a stronger memory model providing less flexibility, but greater consistency.
That would have been PPC 601 and perhaps [entry level] 603 models. Motorola/IBM first released a single processor PPC, then they added support for multiprocessor systems which did have atomics – https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180814-00/?p=99...
Other than that, I immensely enjoyed hand writing PPC assembly – it is a very straightforward RISC design, the «rlwinm» / «rlwimi» instructions are fun – once you figure out how to use them.
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>
Apple does not own a fab. Arm does not own a fab. Qualcomm does not own a fab. I believe IBM does not own any modern fab (some built in early 2000s, yes).
SiFive has raised a total funding of $366M over 6 rounds and 9 years, which has been enough to give them leadership in the RISC-V ecosystem and a product range spanning virtually the entire range ARM's does -- from equivalents for Cortex-M0 (in fact lower) up to Cortex-X3 (and POWER9) for their latest core announced in October (P870, 18 SPECInt2l6/GHz).
For example, the Talos II system has dual (server) CPU sockets with up to 24 cores/96 threads per processor; 16 ECC memory slots with 2TB capacity; SAS controller; out of band management and service processor (separate serial and ethernet ports for the BMC); a server form factor; better capacitors; no onboard audio and only rudimentary graphics; and a thick/quality PCB. It's also made in America. What else were you looking for?
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.
The SPARC-based one is the old MCST R1000.
>who would be willing to fab it
Before the conflict, they used TSMC. Now, AFAIK, the only fab available is Mikron, located in Zelenograd near Moscow. And only 90nm process. There were some rumors about switching to SMIC, but I have not heard any updates for quite some time.
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 )
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.
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.
I had a friend who worked on it: he called it simply "decimal floating" because there was no point :)
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?
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.
https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/
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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23988511
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28578021
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.
Please no. ECC is a must.
Not having ECC being common is an abnormal, bad situation to fix, rather than preferred.
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.
So, why spend all the time improving compiler outputs for a platform that doesn't have that much traction or perceived potential?
And by all indications, such ecosystem is now never going to take off.
In contrast, RISC-V is rapidly growing the strongest ecosystem.
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.
* 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)
The Xbox Series consoles are capable of playing a select portion OG Xbox and Xbox 360 games almost natively, while presumably playing Xbox 360 games via an emulator, but they stopped adding new games to their backwards compatibility program for some god unknown reason despite the fact they were some of the best selling on the platform, but to me it seems like Microsoft wants to shift literally everything to the cloud, starting from Xbox and eventually getting to Windows somewhere down the line, which scares me honestly. Sun said the network is the computer, but I'm sure they meant a network you controlled, not goddamn Microsoft.
The 360 games I've played BC on a Bone have downloaded the whole game onto disk, even with the original DVD in the drive so I'm not sure how much they're changing behind the scenes.
Regardless, I share the sentiment that running everything on Microsoft's infrastructure is a troubling trend. I like xCloud for managing JRPG inventory on the bus, or demoing a game before I commit to the full download, but it's no replacement for local gaming and it shouldn't be pushed as such.
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.
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 ;).
It still is today, comparatively.
RV32I/RV64I are very very small ISAs. RV64G is pretty small -- comparable to, say, MC68010, and a lot simpler than i386.
These small subsets will be supported by the ecosystem forever, for those who want to use them. They will also remain, unchanged, at the heart of more complex standards such as RVA23 and successors, and make up most of the instructions in programs.
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.
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.
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.
I haven't kept up, but competition from AMD, ARM and RISC-V all probably fit that need now.
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.
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.
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.
Apple has actually put a lot of effort to make the x86 to ARM transition as smooth as possible regarding memory consistency model, this is a strong indication that it's not as trivial as you seem to think.
RISC-V has a standardised (optional) TSO memory model mode, plus "fence.tso" instruction that works in normal mode, even on CPUs that predate it (it defaults to the stronger "fence rw,rw" in that case). Well, assuming the CPU core designer read the spec carefully and doesn't trap on unknown "fence" instructions (looking at you, THead...)
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.
It doesn't help so much if your Mac is still Intel based, admittedly.
Though even in .NET you can still get bitten by assumptions about endianness, for example.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.