Submitted via IRC for FatPhil
It has been a long time coming, and it might have been better if this had been done a decade ago. But with a big injection of open source spirit from its acquisition of Red Hat, IBM is finally taking the next step and open sourcing the instruction set architecture of its Power family of processors.
Big Blue is also moving the OpenPower Foundation, which it formed with Google, Mellanox Technologies, Nvidia, and Tyan to help create an ecosystem around the Power architecture six years ago this month, under the administrative control of the Linux Foundation. [...]
In any event, if you have ever wanted to create your own Power processor and was lamenting how expensive it might be to license the technology from IBM, now is your chance.
IBM’s long journey to opening up the Power architecture began a long time ago, starting with the creation of the PowerPC Alliance between Apple, IBM, and Motorola back in 1991, just as Big Blue was starting to get serious about the Power architecture for RS/6000 Unix systems – Unix was all the rage then, and Sun Microsystems and Hewlett Packard were circling IBM’s proprietary mainframes and minicomputers like starving wolves, with a very lean and hungry Oracle snarling nearby. Behind the scenes, IBM was preparing to move its proprietary AS/400 enterprise systems to a common hardware platform with the RS/6000, a credible Windows Servers was years away (and would very briefly run on Power iron), and a young Linus Torvalds had just created the first Linux kernel (which would eventually be the key to keeping Power iron alive in HPC centers in particular and in some enterprise datacenters).
The history is long and complex, but suffice it to say that Motorola and IBM both had their challenges bringing server-class processors to market and the move to 64-bits was particularly difficult. Interestingly, it was IBM’s AS/400 processor team in Rochester, Minnesota which saved the day by creating a very good 64-bit PowerPC chip that also had a double-pumped vector processor embedded in it, and it is this processor, not the ones designed by the AIX people down in Austin, that is the very kernel of all Power chips and systems that have followed since. Eventually Sun Microsystems went up on the rocks with its UltraSparc-III systems, and Hewlett Packard and Intel created Itanium, which had its own litany of woes, and this left the door wide open for IBM to be a spoiler in the early 2000s. And it was just then, back in 2001, when IBM got its first dual-core chip and its first processor to clock above 1 GHz out the door – that would be the Power4 “GigaProcessor” – and IBM brought the hammer down in Unix, delivering twice the bang for the buck as Sun and HP did in Unix, eating market share like crazy.
At the same time all of this was going on, the Motorola 68000 series of chips, which were at the heart of Apple PCs as well as myriad kinds and untold millions of embedded controllers. Arm may rule in controllers today, but back then its was Motorola 68Ks, and the kind of unified processor architecture spanning from embedded devices to datacenter gear was first done – and actually realized – with the PowerPC architecture.
Of course, since then, the Unix market has been largely replaced by X86 systems running Linux and Windows Server, and Sparc from Sun and PA-RISC from HP, and Itanium from Intel are all dead. Motorola has ceded the embedded controller market to Arm, and IBM has been trying to breathe some life into Power, first through the Power.org in 2004 and the OpenPower Foundation in 2013. With each move, IBM has opened up its technology a little more and broadened its appeal. It is a question as to whether this will be enough, with an ascending AMD providing an alternative to Intel processors and the Arm collective fielding many good processors, all using Arm licenses and many adding their own special tweaks to the Arm designs while not violating the Arm architecture.
No one is saying that the OpenPower Foundation will have an easy time growing its ecosystem, despite the many architectural advantages that Power holds over other ISAs, but it now has an easier time than a more closed architecture has. It doesn’t hurt that the Power ISA is being given away royalty free, either.
Source: https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/08/20/big-blue-open-sources-power-chip-instruction-set/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @08:06PM (4 children)
Compiler magic pretty much erased the difference between ISAs. That's how the ugly Intel isa manage to beat all the risc isas.
BTW, does this "open sourcing" means patent liberation?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @08:41PM
Really? [blackhole12.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Thursday August 22 2019, @08:56AM (2 children)
It's not too late. The race between AMD, ARM and IBM isn't for each-other's market share. It's for Intel's. And Intel still hasn't upgraded their fab process. So, as long as you have competitive fabs around, even Alibaba can make their own server RISC-V cores. So, really, it's all up for grabs.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Thursday August 22 2019, @01:49PM (1 child)
Windows games. Not in our lifetime.
Windows and Intel are entrenched.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday August 22 2019, @03:14PM
Fast forward to the late 1970's: IBM mainframes are entrenched! These pesky microcomputers could never be a threat!
Okay, there is a market for them considering how many Apple IIs, TRS-80's and Commodore PETs have been sold. So IBM will introduce a PC, sell about two million, and that will be the end of this microcomputer nonsense!
Well, okay, I'll admit that all other brands of PCs are vastly outselling IBM PCs. So IBM will introduce the new PS/2 with Microchannel. It will be patented. Exclusive. Super expensive. Totally incompatible with the present industry standards. And everyone will drop the industry standards and just flock in droves to the PS/2 and Microchannel!
Windows and Intel may not be so entrenched as you think.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @08:50PM (4 children)
Is there really a space for this between ARM and RISC-V? I can't think of one. The time to do this was right after Apple switched to Intel chips, when there was still some enthusiasm for the architecture but no longer a reasonably priced way to get them. Now it might as well be SPARC or Alpha.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @09:16PM
Not dead, just installed a 64core system, with 4TB of main memory..
One of largest uses of this large scale processors - is a "Next-to-Desk" processor for the US Weather Service. OLDer POWER6 was in box that was 4' wide, 6' deep and 8' high (including dual ups on top) power bus dual 400VDC, you could loose 1 power supply and the thing keeps running. The fun part was placing a stoke PCIex16 Video Card and and a stock PCIex1 USB card in the frame, and configure them to console of the thing. It could and still does crunch numbers.
It is same the Intel and AMD, and the MB makers are so far behind IBM's designs and use.
Plus "Watson" that won Jeopardy was 6 large Power systems connected together in a cluster (BEOWULF?)..
By the way here the Powe units being built-in for the a Super Computer at Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore. top 500 1 adn 2 as of Feb 2019. More here [ibm.com]
Also Power at Google [google.com]
ENJOY.
(Score: 3, Funny) by FatPhil on Wednesday August 21 2019, @09:20PM
Yes.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Interesting) by epitaxial on Thursday August 22 2019, @03:05AM (1 child)
Where are the RISC-V servers you can buy right now? Looks like nothing but vaporware. The two fastest supercomputers in the world now are using POWER9 CPUs.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 22 2019, @06:09AM
Those supercomputers were planned years ago. RISC-V is too fresh.
I hear that companies like Intel will use RISC-V in place of where they would be using ARM. Not big cores but small stuff. We'll see it a lot in SSD controllers used by companies like Western Digital, for example.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @10:01PM (1 child)
Without cheap whitebox (not raptor workstation), adotpion will be the same as now. UltraSPARC has been open sourced long time ago and don't seem very popular.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @06:28AM
As the saying goes, if you can't make it successful, make it open source.
That said, there's an awful lot of Power used in SCADA, but then they don't care whether it's open source or not.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 22 2019, @12:17AM (1 child)
Open sourcing something so often come across as a desperation move. In 3D accelerated graphics on the PC platform, Intel's integrated HD graphics appears to be the most open and most desperate for more market share, while the market leader, NVidia, is the least open. I don't know who is in 3rd behind Android and iPhone. Nokia? Something awful from Microsoft, like some sort of WinCE? Whoever they are, I expect they're a whole lot more open.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @05:59AM
I’ve bought a processor specifically because the integrated graphics chip was well supported/open source.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by aim on Thursday August 22 2019, @06:39AM
Unfortunately, CHRP [wikipedia.org] never went anywhere.
Way back when (mid-90ies), an open hardware platform with PowerPC chips could've had a real chance, with either NT or Linux (or maybe other OSs). I guess IBM just wasn't that interested, and tanked this just as much as they did OS/2.
Then again, DEC had "PC"s based on Alpha that didn't make it on the market, either (not too surprising considering the price). I remember the store chain Vobis carried these for a while. I still won't forgive HP for discontinuing the Alpha (and PA/RISC) in favour of Itanium - the only good thing about that was the former Alpha guys going to AMD, resulting in the Athlon and x86_64.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday August 22 2019, @08:25AM
A fitting name might be "Blueberry Biggie" or so. Cell Processor with Quad PPE and Octal SPUs, some sort of dieshrink-variety of the Playstation one; 4k Video, USB3, decent audio, the usual geek ports. $29.90 with 1 GB, $39.90 with 4. Open source up from metal, solid software support. Some special features for a certain field might help. Ranting about how great the SPUs are for machine learning is fine, but please something tangible, like quad I2S ports, and it will become the go-to solution for pro audio. Keep the support up and wait 10 years, and Power CPUs will never go away.
Other than that, meh. I mean, there actually is a PPC7400 on my desk right now, but even with that I don't feel too attached to the Power family.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @05:50PM
i hope we get a more affordable and latest spec/powerful open hardware desktop mb (and other devices) soon.