> On the other hand, this seems like a sad and humiliating end to a once-proud processor family. It’s as if the Rothschilds or Rockefellers went begging on the street. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
Wow. Why is it that when someone is confident in something and chooses to donate it to the people in the face of a changing market people treat them as if they've failed? This is a massive success and a new beginning - they've taken a closed system they've been working on for decades and opened it up - we should be applauding this action, not denigrating the effort.
> “The future has never looked brighter for the Power architecture,” says Hugh Blemings, Executive Director of the OpenPower Foundation, apparently with a straight face. You don’t drop your price to zero when business is good. Still, the move probably is a good one for Power as an architecture. And a good one for designers the world over, now that they have a major new choice to consider.
> Your very own IBM computer. Who would’ve thought it?
I'm stunned. Who would write something as smugly as this is written... and why?
You don't reduce the price to zero when business is good, no. IBM isn't. They're reducing the price to zero for the parts of their product to which business is now irrelevant and for which free and open collaboration is now more valuable than secrecy and proprietary ownership - and good on them for it. They still charge lots of dollars for their support, their processors and their implementations based on them - and stand to benefit massively from opening the ISA and surrounding infrastructure and patents.
Do yourself a favour and don't write like the article's author does - if you do, it'll just make you sound like an ass.
Just because the architecture is free doesn't mean IBM won't make a shitload of money from the future of this processor. There are a lot of other ways than licensing. RHEL is free since forever and still it's the biggest income source for Red Hat afaik.
The subscription is not free of charge, the software is free of charge. If you buy a subscription and don't extend it or copy my filesystem you can use it without problems. You just won't receive official updates or official support.
However, it's important to note that although the sources for RHEL packages are available as open-source, that still doesn't make CentOS an exact replica of RHEL, and therefore doesn't make RHEL itself "free".
RHEL 8 was released almost 4 months ago and there's no CentOS 8 yet. Mainly because taking the "free" RHEL sources and rebuild them isn't a simple case of removing logos and other "non-free" material. The build process itself (the sequence in which packages must be built so that all of them build successfully and with equivalent functionality to RHEL) is a major piece of what makes RHEL, RHEL, and that isn't free (or even publicly available).
> They're reducing the price to zero for the parts of their product to which business is now irrelevant and for which free and open collaboration is now more valuable than secrecy and proprietary ownership - and good on them for it.
And possibly bad for them. See Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement [1], by Gwern.
> Joel Spolsky in 2002 identified ... the pattern of “"commoditizing your complement"”, an alternative to vertical integration, where companies seek to secure a chokepoint or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers by dominating one layer while fostering so much competition in another layer above or below its layer that no competing monopolist can emerge, prices are driven down to marginal costs elsewhere in the stack, total price drops & increases demand, and the majority of the consumer surplus of the final product can be diverted to the quasi-monopolist.
This move is good for IBM. Not clear what the repercussions will be for other players - even open source developers.
Because it was literally failing in the market. IBM PAID global foundries $1.5 BILLION to take the chip business from them. Now they're giving away the IP in hopes that someone will actually start making chips from it to drive demand for Redhat. If you think Power was a massive success you must be waiting on the edge of your seat for Itanium to finally reach global dominance too.
And they got the highest performance 14nm FinFET process on the market for P9 and z14 while clearing the way to compete against fabless AMD and ARM vendors with P10. If anything, intel looks stupid here after falling behind in fab tech and causing immense turmoil for their external fab customers.
A trivial review of IBM's systems revenue versus the datacenter breakout of any other CPU maker earnings reports will net you: yes, it is indeed quite successful.
No way. 3x performance for 5x the cost doesn’t add up. IBM juices the data center systems metrics with their cross-selling strategy. You need to look at the deals, they give away stuff like storage or even software.
IBM was brilliant in how it rolled up the mainframe/old school Unix/AS400 business on the hardware side. But that playbook was based on big traditional companies and leveraging the base and relationships... there’s a reason that AIX essentially is the last proprietary Unix. But every EA renewal cycle Microsoft is shipping some Azure, some department is buying a SaaS platform, old school IT directors are retiring, etc. It’s a slowly dying business and has been for a long time.
Intel has its own problems, but they are a different category of problem. Even then, we have multiple suppliers, and Intels struggles ultimately help the x64 platform.
> No way. 3x performance for 5x the cost doesn’t add up.
Performance and price never had a linear relationship. Past a certain point each "unit" of performance costs substantially more than the previous. Think 80-20 rule.
This is true, but with modern applications, it tends to be more economical to scale out vs up.
If you're running a big implementation of software that scales up or has licensing rules that make scale-out expensive (ie. Oracle), Power is a no-brainer. Problem is that generally speaking, the industry had gone a different path.
As always this is a "right tool for the job" discussion. There's no silver bullet. But the fact that price rises faster than performance the closer you are to peak performance doesn't say anything about the value of the product. The problem is usually when you can no longer scale out. You'll see the same with storage, GPU, RAM, etc.
Because Power is on such a slow (and getting slower) cycle, it seems like the best case for Power10 is for it to be ahead of Epyc for one year then be behind for 4-5 years. And the worst case is that Power10 will already be behind Epyc when it is released.
Revenue is a different story that doesn't necessarily reflect technical merit.
It's nice that, with the ISA being open, now IBM won't need to compete with commodity chip maker pressures and niche providers can make directly compatible chips on a regular schedule which suits their niches best.
As for the number of cores, memory bandwidth needs to keep those cores fed and now we're just seeing real memory bandwidth improvements - the number of cores and threads is expected to increase commensurately with that in the next revisions of the micro-architecture.
Shipping excellent, up to date, and competitive processors is more than just releasing a moderately tweaked, more tightly binned SKU every 6 months.
Neither AMD nor Intel shine though, if they were the target of the comparison. For the past 5+ years Intel more or less released slightly tweaked versions of the same CPUs and all those tiny bumps were just wiped out anyway so we can basically just count on marginal power improvements. And up until Zen in 2017 AMD had practically been a no-show for 6 years.
I didn't say it was a massive success - but it still did pretty darn well against the x86 juggernaut; and now it's doing something that juggernaut can never do, going open. This will enable so many application tailored designs that IBM itself could never do viably. We'll see how things go - I don't make predictions, but I do have hope for a more open, more hacker friendly future.
something that (x86) juggernaut can never do, going open
Why do you think that? Sure there is some level of cross license/etc, but x86's have been designed/built by a number of 3rd party companies (IDT, rise, cyrix, transmeta, etc) in the past, and basic versions that skip over the currently IP protected bits could probably be done again. x86-64 is nearly 20 years old at this point so patents there will start to expire soon.
You're right. I shouldn't say never. It might, one day, be able to do it - and I hope it does; but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting. The fact that no unified entity owns x86 or it's multitudinous extensions makes going open almost impossible - so, so many independent interests and conflicting businesses would need to align.
This is false, the zXX microprocessors are custom cores that natively run the z/Architecture ISA. Even a trivial comparison will show they are different and not just a microcode layer running on a POWER processor. There is probably some level of sharing (say a high perf divide unit or whatever) but that doesn't make them the same.
They are custom cores, but they likely do share at least some RTL - we won't know, of course, unless IBM decide to share those details and I doubt they would.
Yah, there are embedded power processors scattered all over IBM's hardware lines. The z tape controller a couple years ago was just a rack mount POWER server. OTOH, so is x86, the z's HMC, PE's etc are just x86 laptops/servers.
But thats like calling an x86 server an ARM because there are ARM's in the disk controllers, and on the motherboard acting as BMC's/etc.
iseries is not a mainframe (and you will never hear an IBMer make that mistake). That's whats traditionally called a minicomputer. Sure they make some big ones, but people don't go around calling a superdome flex a mainframe either despite it being a massive machine (something like 1k cores and 48TB of ram in its max config). Its just a fancy x86.
Agreed! An open processor architecture has strictly greater value to me than a proprietary one. x86 is only a good option today because competitors have been allowed to implement it (and often better than Intel). The opening of PowerPC is great news, and hopefully not the "end" of anything.
I don't know where this idea comes from that open-sourcing a platform is a step down. Had Linux started out closed-source and then gone open-source, I think it would be clear to everyone (knowing what we know today) that this would be a huge benefit to all. Same with Javascript, or the JVM, or CLR, or any other platform. Open platforms at any level have more value, full stop.
Is keeping an ISA proprietary of real value to anyone these days? The cost of entry is still high enough that you're not going to be threatened by J Random Hacker. We can already see this. ARM is available for people to license, and TSMC will fab chips for you, yet Apple's CPU division doesn't seem to be seriously threatened by anyone.
And think about what fully opening up POWER like this begins to enable!
IBM has poured a ton of money into having roughly the same ecosystem for POWER as x86: nearly every major Linux distribution ships ppc64le ports [0] (most at full parity to their x86 server release--including testing and building on the platform itself), there's several places to get access to it (even for free as I mentioned on a previous thread [1,2]), and several FPGAs, GPUs, and other accelerator cards work with it [3,4].
Going past x86 (and competing with RISC-V and others), there's a freely available softcore (as I mentioned elsewhere) [5]. And since IBM open sourced the latest ISA with a full, modern instruction set (AES, SHA, Vectors...) -- the community around a softore could eventually go and implement it [6]. And as Talos has shown, even most of the microcode is open source or at least publicly verifiable.
Once the community forms around it, what do you have? [7]
A starting point for all sorts of new projects. Someone else has done nearly all of the work to build something amazingly complex (from hardware gates to a working NodeJS/Go/$LANG stack): all you need to do is tailor this to what you need.
Want to optimize to your specific workload? Grab the softcore, pull out the portions you don't need, deploy/test on a FPGA, and run Linux over the top with a full suite of debugging tools already available.
Want to experiment with new instructions not currently available? Grab a softcore, implement your new instructions, add compiler support or assembly support, and iterate.
Want a low-power core for an IOT device? You could license ARM or you could build on a free POWER softcore.
Want tons of scalar cores for a massively parallel problem? Write it in C, compile to ppc64le, and deploy on many instances of the same softcore running on a FPGA.
None of this is possible with x86 or RISC-V today. If it is, the overhead, time, expertise, and cost makes it exclusive to only large companies and research institutions. IBM has done most of the work to commoditize this. Costs to fab will remain high but deploying on a FPGA would at least tell you if your approach is viable and something you could consider.
Yeah, Intel or AMD could eventually open source this much too. But they'd have to start having conversations with their lawyers... And then with all their partners... And then eventually they'd get to where POWER is today... :)
[6]: Yeah, there's admittedly a lot of work to go from "scalar softcore" to "100% ISA implementation". But if IBM does things correctly and tries to build a community, especially of academic researchers, around the softcore... It could go somewhere.
> And as Talos has shown, even most of the microcode is open source or at least publicly verifiable.
All of the microcode and firmware is fully verifiable and owner buildable/modifiable. Even the secure boot root trust keys are publicly known and can be personalised with your own key with, of course, the well-known key distrusted. AFAIK, the only thing that isn't owner modifiable (or modifiable by anyone else really), besides the silicon, is the one-time programmable ROM which the processor bootstraps from on power-on is publicly verifiable w/ assembler source code. Datasheets and programming information is available for almost every single chip on the board - as are schematics (woohoo! I've already used them to make repairs a few times). As of right now, the only blob required, on the stock system, is related to the broadcom network chip firmware - and that's been fully reverse engineered and a beta version of the firmware which is clean room open source is now available (project ortega).
It's the most open and hacker-friendly system I've ever owned and I really wouldn't want to have to go back to something less.
Yes! Free if you're working on an open source project (check out Oregon State University's Open Source Lab's POWER offerings: VMs (+/- GPUs) and Jenkins integrations). That's what I use.
If you're working on something commercial, you might check out http://integricloud.com/ -- looks like they start at start at $250/mo for a dedicated system (with 16-cores). If you check out their billing rates, it sounds like you can get a single core/thread though for about ~10-20 a month: http://integricloud.com/content/base/managevms.html?viewrate...
(I've never used integricloud but someone commented on my comment mentioning OSUOSL from a week ago)
>Why is it that when someone is confident in something and chooses to donate it to the people in the face of a changing market people treat them as if they've failed?
It's because of past experience. FOSS Foundations are where code/specs are donated to die.
Not because FOSS can't create success stories, but because when a for profit company gives away proprietary specs/code as open source, it's because they see no further benefit from keeping it, and its already dying. And of course, it's precisely the company that employed people working on the thing, and who know it well - a community wont emerge from nothing.
There are counter-examples but few and far between.
Less check back on this "great future" in 5 years...
We probably need to actually look at what the newly open-sourced processor architecture looks like before making assumptions. Perhaps it’s got some amazing merit beyond x86, ARM, etc? Open sourcing it reveals something new and possibly better to the public.
Examine it first then make judgements on the product they are releasing not why they are doing it!
> We probably need to actually look at what the newly open-sourced processor architecture looks like before making assumptions. Perhaps it’s got some amazing merit beyond x86, ARM, etc? Open sourcing it reveals something new and possibly better to the public.
Did they release anything which wasn't publicly known before [1]? IBM "open sourced" the POWER ISA and gave patent cover, meaning they won't sue you if your create a POWER ISA compatible chip without paying them. But the ISA documentation was no secret before either; a secret ISA wouldn't be particularly useful after all.
[1] Yes, they released a microcontroller class softcore. Fine, but very far from POWER9.
There is a huge graveyard of projects that companies "donated" to the community. Think of Solaris operating system, Google Wave. Typically, I am not saying that this is IBM case, but typically it means that a given product does not bring much value for the company and usually this means that a given product does not have too much value at all.
Enterprises are rarely giving something away, they should earn money, so if they do this, it rises suspicion that there is a product that has no value and a company gives away something worthless only for the sake of PR.
There are exceptions, though. Blender failed to make money for the studio that made it, resulting in them selling it to the community for a one-time fee, and it is now one of the great jewels of the open source movement: https://www.blender.org/foundation/history/
It's important to note, though, that in Blender's case the founder remained involved the whole way through, and I think still is. I suspect his dedication and long-term attention is a lot of why it worked out.
OpenSolaris is still alive via forks and parts of it are routinely distributed with Linux and BSDs. Solaris is still proprietary, of course, and is as niche as AIX.
What is concerning here is that opening SPARC did not create a vibrant ecosystem of SPARC parts and computers, which is a shame.
As I see, IBM has the high end well covered with POWER9 and 10 and I'm not sure the embedded PowerPC crowd is that interested in big brother's ISA.
The key difference can be that while SPARC was stagnant when it was opened, POWER is extremely successful (and took over much of what was previously owned by SPARC and HP)
Compared to what? To the meteoric rise of x86 in the data center, and ARM in embedded, not enough it seems?
And yes, currently the two largest supercomputers (Sierra & Summit) are POWER machines, but 1) Most of the oomph in those come from the Nvidia GPU's not the POWER cpu's 2) IBM got none of the CORAL-2 systems, which makes people wonder whether they have given up on the HPC market.
If anything, it seems POWER is on a slow descent towards irrelevance. Considering the nice moves they have made wrt. openness (e.g. the Raptor machines with open firmware all the way down to the metal etc.), I hope I'm wrong and this move helps turn the ship around. We'll see I guess.
POWER belongs to a niche. It's in the very profitable scale-up segment, above the x86 space, where x86s don't reach without some custom chipsets. The high end "reasonable" x86 boxes compete with the low end POWER machines and, from then on, almost nothing competes with them (it's a narrowing niche, I must add, and Oracle doesn't seem very interested in it). If IBM wants POWER to expand, it must do so down towards Intel and AMD.
IIRC, the time Sierra and Summit got designed, POWER offered interconnects faster than anything available on x86, which was important to keep the GPUs in those systems busy. Different HPC systems have different needs and with the latest Xeon Scalable and AMD Rome that advantage may have evaporated a bit - and I'm not surprised IBM didn't win or even propose. Let's see what OpenCAPI and OMI bring to the table and if, with the good experiences with the Talos desktops as proof that the software ecosystem is there some foundry gets interested in something that could compete with lower end Xeon in the embedded space.
> It’s as if the Rothschilds or Rockefellers went begging on the street. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
A good thing to point out is that while I have a vague notion that Rotschilds are bankers, I have strictly no idea what business the Rockfellers were in. I only know them because of their charity efforts.
Giving back is not a defeat, it is the culmination of success.
Standard Oil. It's a bit long-winded, but I recently read and would recommend "Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.".
That you don't know what business Rockefeller was in would please him greatly beyond the grave. The man went to great lengths to obscure his business activities, and there was a concerted effort late in his life and by his descendants to ensure that people remembered the family for their charitable activities, and not the business activities that precipitated the largest anti-trust action in history.
Exactly. Comparing open source to begging on the street? Yeah, sure, pretty accurate comparison if you are living in a parallel universe where street beggars run the world's infrastructure.
For those not “in the know”, the PowerPC 615 was a never-released design that was pin-compatible with the Pentiums of the day and would have been able to run x86 and PowerPC (in both 32- and 64-bit variants).
Seems like a move to prevent RISC-V from gaining a foothold in the server market. Recently there's a potential for server market upset; with trade wars, Intel struggling with die shrinks, ML and custom silicon demands (see FPGA), and recent x86 security flaws. Large players will be looking at optimizing how their infrastructure is set up.
It's a good move on behalf of IBM. But it might be a bit too late. If you were a company with a demand for custom silicon, you'd probably choose RISC-V as they already have experienced companies willing to provide support and services to meet your needs. With POWER your choices will be limited.
> Seems like a move to prevent RISC-V from gaining a foothold in the server market.
On it's face, yes - absolutely. IBM had to do it now if it didn't want its lunch entirely eaten out from under it. That said, that's a good thing. I think we'll see both architectures working from opposite sides and moving into each other's markets. It's still very early days for RISC-V and OpenPOWER, so hopefully they'll be able to benefit each other. We've got excellent open friendly hardware for OpenPOWER (Raptor Computing System's Talos/Blackbird and soon, Condor lines) and we're getting there with RISC-V embedded systems and mobiles.
At least now on both the high and low end of the performance spectrum we have open alternatives for all needs. Here's to a more open, more diverse future where none of us has to scramble to be everywhere, all the time, all at once.
Sun released OpenSparc as open source (including the design) in 2006. It was obsolete already and was hard to work with. I don't think it got anywhere.
The PowerPC is perhaps better placed, may not get much farther.
1) SPARC was _never_ commercially competitive versus contemporaries. Not an ISA problem but they never had the design acumen other CPU makers did/do and the manufacturing partners always treated it second rate. I could stop here, there is simply no comparison or lesson in SPARC other than how not to run a business. It was successful in spite of this due to many other reasons (primarily ecosystem).
2) POWER9 is still competitive against chips just now launching 3 years later on a full step of manufacturing processes.
3) Other CPU vendors are about to hit an enormous memory wall. IBM is 4 years ahead of the industry here with OMI. Can still use cheap standard DDR4 by putting the buffers on board or on chiplets in P10. OMI submitted to JEDEC for standardization so it may be a total non-issue.
4) IBM's AXON PHY is 4 years ahead of everyone else in design and actually deployed. Glueless AI/ML/DSP nodes with GPUs or FPGAs versus i.e. nvidia DGX. Much better interconnect than infinityfabric.
5) P10, P11, and P12 are already planned. Expect future supercomputing wins especially with P11 (US gov likes to spread contracts among vendors every other generation). The enterprise POWER business is big enough to subsidize this game for a while.
If there is an error or impasse, it is that most developers now consume VMs on cloud services and for cloud operators the decision to move off x86 is a bureaucratic nightmare in the few companies that are technical enough to do it. POWER will live for a long time under IBM. The most likely outcome of this announcement is PowerISA MCUs and SoCs may see a resurgence. I can't see any trends clearly enough to predict POWER uptake outside that.
Note that the first OMI controller from Microchip (nee Microsemi) will have fully open source firmware. This is huge coming from Microsemi/Microchip ... and likely a result of IBM strongarming them for it. Even with a complete shift in memory architecture, IBM have still managed to ensure that their ecosystem is fully open and auditable - beautiful.
Also, take a look at the Protected Execution Facility (aka Ultravisor) ... it permits systems owners to separate hypervisor administration and code from guest machines and shrinks the trusted code base to almost nothing. Also, fully open source. Intel and AMD have something kind of similar but it requires proprietary firmware and trusted key signing by the vendor while IBM's design doesn't require any proprietary firmware or trusted key signing by the vendor at all. Very very cool.
If your guests start talking to one another, then it still has to be permitted by the ultravisor or the network layer. Isolation is subjective and PEF/Ultravisor permit you to separate the administrators of the hypervisor from the administrators of the guest workloads. This is something you don't really get elsewhere with the same security guarantees and/or open implementation.
Their complete systems were competitive in terms of having a good (price, features, usability, reliability, support, ...) tuple, but that doesn't mean every attribute of their systems was the best of all systems on the market. I know people who bought Solaris systems, and nobody bought it because of the CPU.
You say they were the market share leader through the "early 2000's". In 2005, their OS was open-sourced. Sure enough, everyone I knew using Solaris since then has run it on x86. People like the OS but only used SPARC when they had no choice.
They also had manufacturing problems at times. Can't remember with it was the Ultrasparc III or IV for this specific example, but when a whole bunch of CPU's were recalled because the ceramic would actually seperate from the rest of the chip once it warmed up.
Right now you can buy the Talos II motherboard (or a complete prebuilt system) from Raptor Engineering, and along with it you can have a single or dual processor setup of up to 22 cores each with 4 way SMT (essentially hyperthreading). It's still early days but I hear it's competitive with x86_64 at certain things and runs Gentoo well.
As a bonus most of the firmware of the components on the board are open source as well, and just a git clone away.
(Not sponsored by them, but I've considered such a system for myself)
From the article: “The Talos II server with dual IBM POWER9 22-core processors ended up delivering performance around that of the EPYC 7551 previous-generation Naples processor. But overall the Talos II POWER9 had quite a respectable showing compared to the x86_64 CPUs.”
I got to use POWER8 and POWER9 when the company I was working for partnered with IBM. My main reason I liked them was: they’re very cool, heh. The other reason was I quite enjoyed the AltiVec instruction set was a great fit for the work I was doing, the integer vector instructions were awesome. Nothing you can’t do on X64, but was nicer in a few ways.
The author seems to not know the difference between the chip and the ISA - Instruction Set Architecture. How this is implemented in silicon (or other substrate) does not seem to have been released, so you'd have to create your own cores, cache, memory interface and all that jazz. It does mean that RISC-V chips could be used as a starting point, because they already implement all that, but with a different ISA. However, it's probably non-trivial to implement a different ISA on an existing chip design. AMD did it with their early Athlon chips, by using a translation layer, but that's not the most efficient way to do it...
They just open-sourced the instruction set. That is a big thing but if I am understanding it correctly, this is pretty much relinquishing the copyright to the instruction set. They are not open-sourcing any CPU.
So, partially correct. The ISA, along with the new memory bus (OMI) and some other infrastructural specs - are being licensed under an open source license with patent grants; it's still very much copyrighted, in the same way the Linux kernel is Open Source but still copyrighted. The microarchitectural implementations of that ISA specification - POWER9, etc - are still proprietary, even if extremely well publicly documented. IBM still expects to make a lot of money with the highest performing open source ISA implementation on the market.
Yes. It's best to contrast this versus say ARM where everyone has to pay for the ISA and potentially they also license an implementation or partial reusable designs. Sparc, Risc-V, MIPS and PowerISA are royalty free ISAs with open source implementations.
The ISA and implementation of POWER has been license-able from the beginning. You can still license implementations, depending on what you are doing that may be pretty cost effective.
Hiding in the details of your comment and partially in reply to the parent...
You can't fab the same POWER9 that ships from IBM, but like you implied, someone could (eventually) fab a POWER9 CPU built on an open-source core.
The microwatt project [0] was demoed at the OpenPOWER Summit and is an open-source softcore. I'm very interested in watching to see what happens with this project and how much of the ISA they end up implementing. They've run a subset of micropython [1] on it and apparently gotten a few FPGAs working. The Summit talk [2] mentioned DRAM support and Linux support potentially being on the roadmap.
As far as I'm aware, the entire POWER9 design is available for licencing for $$$.
The only obstacle to fabbing it yourself would be that it's designed to be fabbed on GF's 14HP process, which incorporates some IBM-proprietary fab technology which was transferred from IBM when they spun off their own fab to GF; thus AFAIK the GF 14HP process is only licenced for IBM's use. Since IBM is willing to licence POWER9, perhaps they'd also be willing to negotiate access to the process.
(GF 14HP is different to GF 14LPP, which is what other GF 14nm customers (e.g. AMD Zen) use.)
Let me address one aspect that nobody seems to have thought of: in the last years we have been diving right into the era of processors containing smaller processors, and closed blobs instructing them to do things neither users nor developers have any knowledge or control, that is, pervasive potential surveillance built by design in every piece of hardware bigger than a toaster.
If IBM donating the Power instruction set and patents means that just one CPU will come out of it, although 50% more slow and costly than the competition but free from shady subsystems, ie a trustworthy CPU, I would call that a huge victory.
Closed chipsets device drivers are another similar problem, still that would be a good start nonetheless.
What worries me is that SPARC was already opened and that failed to create a market for SPARC devices. It could be that now the open source market is mature enough to drive many competing implementations of POWER to fill niches IBM can't.
IBM already sold Power8 to Suzhou PowerCore which then went out of business (if it was ever a real business). When it comes to processors China seems to be throwing everything at the wall (MIPS, Power, ARM, etc.) and almost nothing is sticking.
Nothing works, until something does. And the something has little to do with the actual merits of the thing, but rather, the timing and confluence of events sureounding it.
As an example, the fact that a major Chinese company was fairly capriciously prevented from working may be a triggering event that would concentrate all Chinese companies’ minds towards adopting a new ISA and chip technology that’s open.
Their collab with AMD is working out okay though right? And still gets a chunk of money from licensing server chip designs that they (China) then use for super computers
Don't know about AMD collaboration, but their home-grown supercomputers use some home-grown ISA, reportedly roughly based on an extended variant of MIPS.
As an aside, it was long before Trumps trade war with China that USA refused to sell chips for Chinese supercomputers, prompting them to seriously start developing their own.
Will be interesting whether we'll see Chinese POWER designs, or whether they continue with MIPS and RISC-V.
My reading is that you can now make a simple CPU compatible with the power ISA which gets you compatibility with power ports like gcc and the linux kernel.
But to be competitive with Epyc, Xeon, and the Power 9 you'd have to spend a pretty huge amount of R&D. It does sound like there's some IP related to the memory controller which is available, but there's much required for a high end CPU that is not available.
We've a proven ISA with performant implementations, of both silicon and compilers, now, and now we as a community can invest in that R&D together under open terms. It's a big step forward.
IBM over the past couple of decades have been gradually shifting away from hardware and more into a service provider. Yes they still do their mainframe style behemoths and their AS/400's (not sure what branding they have upon those now ?-series last I touched that field) and with those have consolidates much upon the power CPU (least the AS/400 stuff).
What I do wonder is - what will they do with AIX? As I do foresee it going the way of Solaris, and the parallels to their CPU architecture do seem somewhat uncanny.
Personally I have a little mixed feelings about this having used IBM's first ever attempt at a RISC CPU in the RT6150 and got one of the first (before public release) hands on the power 1 cpu used in an RS/6000.
I also do find it interesting how an instruction set is so coveted in a day and time that compilers are so mature that to create your own ISA and adapt a compiler to accommodate it is not out of the grasp of an individual and much more easier a task than days prior. But then the real hard work is designing a CPU to run that instruction set, that becomes very much more than a one-person job. Though who knows - maybe in 10-20 years from now, the ability to design some silicon becomes as accessible as programming in SCRATCH (drag and drop style design/programming).
But back to the Power Architecture, what is IBM's real plans here - charity/PR or a way to shift processor design into a realm of outsourcing that enables them to focus upon their more profitable streams and focus - like services? Maybe.
Though I do feel they may of missed the boat upon this, what with Apple at one stage a big Power cpu user and now looking to shift towards ARM, of which they design their own CPU's. Could Apple embrace this opertunity or would the transition be a cross to hard for them to bear? That is for me one of the signs on how this will traction. If Apple shows interest, then this could be epicly big. Not saying that if they don't that it will fail. But do feel that had they did this 5-10 years ago, things would of been more likely to traction and grow. Today, beyond some niche area's, I'm not so sure it will be as epic as it could of been and may just be a case of too little too late.
Equally I'm mindful that whilst IMHO it is too late to have as big an impact as it could of been, it may prove damaging towards RISC V CPU progression and by splitting the options open - may well damage both and only aid the existing Intel and Arm options out there.
>Power efficiency / performance-per-Watt tests were not conducted due to the remote ARM testing. Likewise, there isn't performance-per-dollar metrics due to many variables at play when it comes to factoring in the ARM and POWER9 costs.
That seems to make the benchmarks entirely useless for gauging Power performance for the server market. Not saying it didn’t fall behind its competitors (I’d be surprised if it didn’t given how much more AMD and ARM makers have been investing in chip development), but these benchmarks don’t tell us that.
The PowerPC ISA was mostly documented and the patents generally only apply to hardware implementations, not software emulation. And realistically IBM never saw QEMU as a threat so they didn't destroy it (let's not mention Hercules though).
PowerPC has been dead for almost a decade, no? The moment Apple switched over to Intel and deprecated PowerPC, PPC became irrelevant. Beyond the target parties that care about software archaeology, what is the importance of this action?
It may have academic value, but practically speaking, how does this matter?
Just asking the crowd in case there is a perspective I am missing.
> The moment Apple switched over to Intel , PPC became irrelevant
In a good year, Apple sold about 3 million PowerPC Macs. Sony and Microsoft sold about 80 million PS3s and Xbox 360s each. I think one could make the case that those Macs were of questionable relevance to begin with... (yes I know they used G5 Macs for dev machines)
From what I've read, the latest POWER9 servers from IBM are very competitive (on performance, not necessarily price). Newer chips that run PPC ISA support ppc64el (little-endian mode) so that porting software is significantly easier. gcc has a mature backend for this instruction set so it's a simple recompile in many cases on Linux.
PPC machines are also required if for some reason you're still running AIX, IIRC.
> PPC machines are also required if for some reason you're still running AIX, IIRC.
It's probably a way of making more money out of those legacy customers
(yes because if you're still running AIX you're deep down in legacy territory, and you might just want to look at recompiling your stuff for Linux but chose to suffer instead)
You're missing servers. Power9 is cheaper but similar performance to Intel Xeons and Google has invested quite a bit into using Power servers (although we don't know if they actually do).
I'm sure all the effort Google put into being able to compile google3 for Power resulted in significant price concessions from Intel, which I imagine was the point of the project in the first place.
Sorry for the jargon. google3 is the name of their perforce repository that contains all of their backend code, everything that runs in their datacenters.
Yes. IIRC its main break with RISC orthodoxy is storing comparison results in one of a small number, 8 I think, of special purpose registers and then specifying which of those branches to look at in conditional operations like branches.
