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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Non-x86 Platforms Thread: for all your ARM, RISC-V, SPARC, and PDP-11 needs
 
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Gwaihir
Dec 8, 2009
Hair Elf

Hasturtium posted:

As a minor correction, POWER originally referred to IBM's in-house designs for large chips intended to run z/OS and the like run RS/6000 workstations (thanks, PCjr sidecar! That'll teach me to post before coffee on a Friday...). PowerPC was the name given to the cooperative efforts of IBM, Motorola, and Apple (called AIM) to create microprocessors built on the same fundamental architecture. Apple eventually switched to x86 because IBM and Motorola couldn't prioritize a low power chip to replace the G4, and the G5 - itself a modified Power4 design with an Altivec unit, some internal changes, and a hobbled amount of cache to keep power and thermals in check - was incapable of being adapted for a mobile form factor at acceptable performance. PowerPC is effectively dead, though FreeScale was creating designs that were promising for some time and Apple wrestled with the decision internally for a while.

Power is built with performance as a primary concern rather than power optimization. Power9 chips feature support for SMT4 or SMT8 (so a quad core chip would expose itself as 16 or 32 execution threads), relatively shallow pipelines, quad-channel memory and 40+ PCIe lanes, and a massive number of registers - according to Wikipedia the breakdown is:

32× 64/32-bit general purpose registers
32× 64-bit floating point registers
64× 128-bit vector registers

They are built chiefly for server applications and are not SIMD powerhouses compared to modern designs from Intel and AMD, but I've wanted to play with one for several years. Raptor Computing manufactures several motherboards that are fully open source and use the smaller Sforza form factor of chip. It'd set me back as much as a solid Threadripper, but I'm still thinking about it...

Edit: MIPS was the CPU design SGI pushed for all its in-house chips, and even made it way to the N64. It's slowly ebbed in general relevance since, though as you say it still has a presence in embedded and SFF computing. Come to think of it, I had a Blu-ray player driven by one.

If you really wanted to make extremely poor decisions regarding Power chips, I have an IBM Power 770 that we just replaced with a Power 9 last year as surplus. It'd cost a loving fortune to ship, I'm sure, but it's 2x CECs with 256gb of RAM and 4 of the 8 core Power7+ chips in it.

* # ¿ Jun 19, 2021 17:08
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# ¿ May 14, 2024 16:46
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Gwaihir
Dec 8, 2009
Hair Elf

Hasturtium posted:

What would you want for that behemoth?

I wouldn't charge for it since it's surplus, other than just whatever it took to pack and ship. But, like, that would be a lot, lol



The old machine is on top. Each of those CECs are about 100 pounds, I think.

* # ¿ Jun 20, 2021 03:15
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Gwaihir
Dec 8, 2009
Hair Elf
Yeah, it's, uh wildly impractical for any use case that isn't a server room, really. Fans are just far too over the top, even at idle.

I know it's not really super thread topical, but that machine really was incredibly nice to use. That paradigm of "we're running everything on one machine, but it's super reliable and really really serviceable" has long since been replaced, but I still appreciate it for what it is, and for the engineering that went in to the hardware to make it work. 8 years in service for that sucker and not a single instance of hardware induced downtime was a pretty good run.

* # ¿ Jun 20, 2021 04:57
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Gwaihir
Dec 8, 2009
Hair Elf
:buddy:

I can't wait to see what that sucker can do once it's not locked under core license restrictions!

* # ¿ Jul 4, 2021 17:06
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Gwaihir
Dec 8, 2009
Hair Elf

CommieGIR posted:

Tried to power up the Power 770s but the HMC is toast so if I want to boot them I'll need another HMC or connect to them serially to boot

Ever get things going to the point of loading up an OS and running any benchmarks btw?

* # ¿ Aug 7, 2021 21:18
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# ¿ May 14, 2024 16:46
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Gwaihir
Dec 8, 2009
Hair Elf
Intel was run by morons in the years it would have been relevant to make one, by the time they took it seriously it was too late because everyone in the whole market had already gotten on board with Qualcomm or designed their own.

* # ¿ Jan 12, 2023 19:34
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Non-x86 Platforms Thread: for all your ARM, RISC-V, SPARC, and PDP-11 needs