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As a minor correction, POWER originally referred to IBM's in-house designs for large chips intended to 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. Hasturtium fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Jun 18, 2021 |
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Jun 18, 2021 12:18
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PCjr sidecar posted:Power was never used for any of the z/OS mainframes. It was IBM’s RISC system designed for the RS/6000 workstations originally. The mainframe chips are the exact opposite of RISC. They’re weird and kind of cool. Agh, seen and noted. It's been a long time since I thought about it, and my brain misfired. I would love to read more about their mainframe chips; maybe I'll hunt something down over my lunch break. Friends of mine rooted for Alpha and were crestfallen when it was mothballed, but outside of a burly FPU and general 90s workstation competence I never quite got the big deal. Can anybody fill me in?
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Jun 18, 2021 15:03
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Gwaihir posted: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. What would you want for that behemoth?
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Jun 19, 2021 19:52
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Mr.Radar posted:Thanks for making this thread. I actually bought a Raptor Computing Systems Blackbird (with the 8-core CPU) back at the start of the pandemic when I was afraid they might go out of business if there was a recession. Fortunately they haven't, but I have also barely even booted that system since I put it together (partly because I didn't have room in my apartment for another proper desktop PC setup so it's incredibly uncomfortable for me to actually use the system). You can AMA about it, but due to using it so little I probably won't be able to answer any questions about "daily" uses. One great resource I found was the Talospace blog, made by the (former) maintainer of Classilla and TenFourFox (for Classic MacOS and PPC OSX respetively). He has both the big boy Talos II workstation as his main daily-driver PC and a Blackbird as an HTPC (!) and he's also (slowly) working on porting the Firefox JS JIT to POWER. What are your general impressions? What were you hoping to use it for? Have you considered setting up a little USB switch to toggle between desktops, and feeding different inputs into the monitor to facilitate swapping between them?
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Jun 19, 2021 20:26
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Gwaihir posted: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 Oof. It's a hell of a setup and way more than I could use. Maybe see if an open source project could avail themselves of it and get a tax write off in the process - I'm pretty sure NetBSD or OpenBSD could use something like that.
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Jun 20, 2021 04:31
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It looks like the Blackbird is backordered - any idea on when it's likely I could get one? I'm about to start unloading various PC bits and other sundries on the SA Mart and elsewhere to that end...
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Jun 23, 2021 00:49
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CommieGIR posted:Goony Trip report! Kudos on a great acquisition! I hope you do cool things with it.
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Jul 4, 2021 17:29
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mdxi posted:Russia announces plans to push homegrown RISC-V designs into the government and education spaces by 2025. It'll be interesting to see how they perform. I do wonder how RISC-V will perform in non-testbed scenarios. Still making slow, steady progress on selling my backlog of computers for the purpose of acquiring an eight core POWER9 machine here. People keep advocating for Fedora on ppc64le, but Ubuntu's my comfort zone - how much harder will I make my life if I go that route instead?
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Jul 14, 2021 19:16
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eschaton posted:I just built out a little RISC-V workstation! Cool! How’s performance of the SiFive, and what are your initial impressions?
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Jul 26, 2021 02:06
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It looks like a Haiku kernel hacker got the OS running in a barebones fashion on a SiFive HiFive Unmatched in about two weeks. As a BeOS head once upon a time, it makes me happy to see it. edit: Also, am I crazy or does the Unmatched not have a front panel USB connector? Hasturtium fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 02:51
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eschaton posted:Port NetBSD! Considering there’s a cheerful lunatic porting Slackware to Power, I’m shocked NetBSD doesn’t support it. Maybe CommieGIR can offer some level of server access to an OSS project. Hasturtium fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Aug 9, 2021 |
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Aug 9, 2021 02:47
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Pham Nuwen posted:Just discovered a Sun Ultra 10 in the crawlspace under my house. Trying to decide if I want to ask the landlord about it or just let sleeping SPARCs lie; god knows I've got enough old computer hardware around already. Mail it to me? I could use a SPARC, if your landlord doesn’t care.
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Sep 2, 2021 22:44
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Pham Nuwen posted:I don't even know if it works, and the shipping would be hells of expensive, and when I look at your avatar I worry that you might try to revive Plan 9's sparc64 kernel and that's just not good for anyone If it doesn’t work I’ll Frankenstein an x86 machine or a cluster of Pi’s into it. You can trust me! And I solemnly swear Plan 9 will not find a home there. Heck, if you want to see if it powers on that’d be a useful first step. I’ll cover shipping if it comes down to it.
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Sep 2, 2021 23:15
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It’s a deal. Thank you. 
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Sep 2, 2021 23:23
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priznat posted:Wow. I had seen some article header about RISC-V multicore linux capable cpus and wonder if that’s what they’re getting into first perhaps. Something in the data center (no idea what) or perhaps a new wifi base station powered by one? Newer than the Unmatched? Because those are going for a mere $680. Which is more than my alternative CPU-curious rear end can rationalize for sub-Raspberry Pi 4-class performance, but I know boutique hardware will never be cost-competitive with commodity kit.
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Sep 2, 2021 23:34
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Just ordered an eight core Power9 combo from Raptor Computing yesterday, and 32GB of ECC RAM for it. It's currently on backorder, but I'll give it a month before I start getting antsy. Anyone have prior experience that's useful in getting started, or thoughts on the platform?
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Sep 25, 2021 13:48
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I know nobody’s kicked this thread in a while, but I fell down a bit of a YouTube wormhole learning a bit about PA-RISC. Anybody have thoughts or impressions? Of all the machines I used in college computer labs or friend’s eBay-harvested collections, they’re one I never managed to run into.
Hasturtium fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Feb 12, 2022 |
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Feb 11, 2022 03:45
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I still want to see a Power Microwatt SoC, but god only knows when that’ll happen. Also vaguely bummed that Sifive is stopping production on the Hifive Unmatched. The CPU performance was underwhelming, but I still wanted to play around with a brand new ecosystem. And still waiting, since September, for my Raptor Computing Blackbird kit.
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Feb 11, 2022 18:20
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MIPS chips made it into a lot of Blu-Ray players, once upon a time. I’d imagine ARM is dominating that steadily decreasing niche by now, but that was a pocket where they succeeded for a while. In talking about Itanium, what was the clear advantage it had over HP-UX, and why’d it tank so hard despite the combination of support thrown behind it and the widespread capitulation of entrenched players on the assumption that Intel would just outspend everyone into inevitability?
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Feb 14, 2022 17:15
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priznat posted:Is the Power10 (notice they are changing from POWER) going to have lower end workstations like the POWER9 had with Sforza from companies like Raptor? Everything I've seen makes it look like pretty major server iron. Raptor’s balked at Power10 due to the IMC and at least one other component using closed source firmware, so I wouldn’t count on it. The use of said blobs seems economically driven by Global Foundries’ failure to deliver on sub-14nm and the need to pivot to a different process, so thanks GloFo. :-\ Power10 is gigantic - Raptor ran a Twitter survey to halfassedly assess interest and indicated the end product would be a gigantic single socket in an EATX motherboard. They’re not moving forward with P10 and in at least one interview Tim Pearson indicated they’re looking at less expensive Power solutions from “other potential sources.” I don’t know what that means, but I’d guess it’d be an outgrowth of Microwatt or some other in-development chip. I should have bookmarked one I read about not long ago. Still waiting for news on my Blackbird shipment, let alone the thing itself. Here’s hoping it’s worth it. Edit: I’ve seen a couple of SPARC ATX boards periodically appear on eBay… are they hopelessly ancient, or at least potentially fun to play with?
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Feb 15, 2022 22:17
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priznat posted:The talon II from raptor has dual redundant 1620W supplies, although the CPUs are fairly low powered (90W TDP for the 4 core, 160 for 8 core) so I'm not sure why it is that high. Probably was just the supermicro case they bought included them. Or so you could jam a ton of GPUs in there too. Even that 160W target is high for the 8 core parts - according to the wiki, where people have measured wall power draw, that’s for the CPU and motherboard with RAM, running an artificially high workload. I predict mine will end up being about like one of the 125W Piledriver machines I used to run, and I’m only slapping a Radeon Pro W5500 in there, so before factoring in drives, fans, and incidentals I’d probably top out at 300W or so. Note that the 18 and 22 core CPUs probably hit very reliably close to their quoted 160W TDP, and if you double them up then you’ll basically have a little more than a single Threadripper Pro’s 280W heat output to deal with. The dual redundant PSUs are likely a holdover from the SuperMicro case, or overspecified just to accommodate somebody tossing a pair of modern RTX cards in for machine learning. CUDA apparently runs fine on little endian Power even if Nvidia won’t bother porting the rest of the driver over.
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Feb 15, 2022 23:57
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PCjr sidecar posted:glofo really hosed power; the future power roadmap is steering hard to high end enterprise niche There are still a number of open projects in motion*, but I agree that it’s behind RISC-V. At least it’s not as dead in the water as OpenSPARC. edit: Libre-SoC, that’s the one I was trying to remember earlier. Let’s hope that goes somewhere. Hasturtium fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Feb 16, 2022 |
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Feb 16, 2022 00:59
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I’m still wondering what Apple will choose to do for the true blue Mac Pro. They’re obviously enjoying the advantages of an integrated SoC design, but if there’s a single market segment of theirs that will demand upgradeable memory and PCIe connectivity, it’s their Pro contingent. Do you suppose they’ll allow upgrades with ECC registered DDR5 and discrete cards, or will they offer ludicrous performance with up to, say, 512GB RAM and tell their customers to fall in line?
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Mar 10, 2022 18:09
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Update: it’s been nine months with no indication my Power9 bundle is fixing to ship, so I’ve requested a refund from Raptor Computing. That’ll teach me to order something that’s backordered without a firm date for expected restocks. I’m disappointed but don’t think it’s wrong to have second thoughts after the better part of a year, and it feels like they’re being increasingly evasive about the state of things on their social media. Here’s hoping they don’t fight me on it…
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Jul 4, 2022 16:33
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priznat posted:Raptor was reeeeeeeally slow on fulfilling orders back after the power9 launch and it didn’t sound like it got much better even before supply chain issues. Good luck I hope it works out! I'm sympathetic. But I don't feel comfortable having money hanging in the ether waiting on hardware that's showing no signs of appearing soon beyond vague assurances (most recently back in April on Twitter) that they are "very close at this point to having them back in stock in significant quantities." For the amount I spent I could literally get a baseline Mac Studio with education pricing and a Ryzen 5700x CPU plus motherboard, and have enough left over for groceries.
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Jul 4, 2022 17:23
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Update: Raptor Computing apparently got in Blackbirds for the first time in forever late last week. My request for a refund is canceled, and I’m getting my Power9 kit next week. (They’d send it sooner, but I’m driving across state this weekend.) I am genuinely thrilled.
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Jul 5, 2022 17:44
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priznat posted:Sweet! They are pretty nifty machines. Currently planning to dual boot Void and Alma Linux - the former because I like its minimalism and default 4KB kernel page sizes, which plays better with the amdgpu driver for the Radeon Pro W5500 I’m installing, and the latter because I’ve put off learning RHEL forever, and I may as well learn it on IBM hardware.
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Jul 5, 2022 19:02
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The Blackbird is here and working, but I can’t get hwclock and date to sync with each other, so networking isn’t working. So far, it’s a computer running Void Linux without a network connection. I’m looking forward to getting system time sorted so I can start pulling in packages, getting video firmware and options sorted, and switching from the BMC 2D video to a proper Radeon with 4K support. Here’s hoping this doesn’t take too long… edit: I forgot to connect to the BMC after assembling it. With my MacBook Pro and a crossover Ethernet cable this hopefully won’t take long tomorrow… Hasturtium fucked around with this message at 03:44 on Jul 25, 2022 |
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Jul 24, 2022 23:31
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So a happy update. The Blackbird fired right up, but I wasn’t able to connect to the BMC to set the hardware clock because the wrong, bad network firmware was flashed on at the factory. About 24 hours after contacting Raptor they emailed me firmware and a flashing tool (as well as the source code repo for that tool if I preferred to compile it manually after reading the source), I flashed it, and after a power cycle networking was up and running. Since then I’ve gotten my Radeon Pro W5500 working without issue in Void Linux, and it’s been a very smooth, stable, and fast experience. I’ll start pushing it’s limits a bit more next week. And they’re taking orders again, and o track to ship out all previously ordered Blackbirds by the end of August. Cheers!
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Aug 6, 2022 01:45
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ARM has a deeply entrenched ecosystem advantage. I have zero doubt RISC-V could shake things up on the lower end/embedded sector, but some of the proclamations made have sounded a little cargo cult-ish. I’d like to think OpenPower could get a shot in the arm between Power11 down the line and LibreSOC in the next year or two, especially with the SIMD improvements cited as part of SVP64, but we will see. I have an eight core Power9 in a Blackbird motherboard, so I am a little biased in the ecosystem’s favor. Also, hearing lately about Loongson dusting off old/deprecated MIPS64 code, barely changing it, and submitting it to OSS projects with predictably bewildered responses has me all curious about where that’s going. Hasturtium fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Jul 10, 2023 |
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Jul 10, 2023 00:08
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It looks like a number of motherboards with Loongson CPUs are appearing on AliExpress and the like at sub-$400 price points. With the knowledge that the CPU is not performance-competitive with x86 and subject to various limitations and frustrations endemic to being outside of more widespread ISAs, what are these things supposed to be like?
Hasturtium fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Sep 6, 2023 |
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Sep 6, 2023 01:37
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Twerk from Home posted:Isn't Loongarch just MIPS with the serial numbers filed off? MIPS has been around for ages and there's no reason that it couldn't be used in a high performance design but it hasn't anytime recently. Yeah, Loongarch is essentially little-endian MIPS64 with some adjustments. I was luridly curious, but by the time I’d be done frankenputering something together, I’d be around halfway to a Mac Studio at Micro Center, and I’d get to deal with an obscure architecture where at least half the documentation is written in Chinese and Debian hasn’t even solidified support. I don’t feel bad for looking into it, but it’s not for me. Rumor has it Raptor Computing is going to make an announcement about an open Power10 motherboard this week, for release next year. I’m happy with my Power9/Blackbird, but look forward to seeing the benchmarks.
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Oct 18, 2023 03:31
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I hear a lot about China’s investment in RISC-V, and good for them, but what’s up with Loongson? Is the value proposition of undead MIPS64LE with a twist still worth funding and investment?
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Oct 27, 2023 02:42
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In other news Raptor Computing - they of the open source and increasingly inaccessibly priced Talos II and Blackbird motherboards for IBM Power9 chips - has announced that their next boards will use Solid Silicon's S1 Power ISA v3.1 CPUs. Details on who Solid is are light, but it appears the S1 is essentially a version of Power10 with the controversial closed-source bits replaced with new open ones. More info here. I'm happy enough with my Power9 that I'm skipping this one, but if there's any thread on these dead gay forums for news about OpenPower, I figured this was it. also i'm finally going to get a mac studio yay
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Nov 14, 2023 03:09
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eschaton posted:they don’t even need to do that, they could just implement the instruction set, since that’s not protectable IP in and of itself CISC? In this economy?
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Dec 25, 2023 02:49
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I was really looking forward to SiFive’s P550 board, but it sounds like that was quietly canceled or is stuck in development hell, and possibly been replaced by a P650 design that hasn’t been formally announced… In terms of non-x86 motherboards, what’s available in a uATX/ITX form factor with a PCIe x16 slot besides the Hifive Unmatched? The Milk-V Oasis would be perfect if it had an expansion slot, the Pioneer is wild overkill for what I’m looking for, and a lot of ARM boards have limitations in their PCIe root complex that make GPUs fraught to impossible. Is there another option I’m missing? I’ve already got a Power9, but that’s my main machine and I’m an inveterate tinkerer.
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Feb 20, 2024 23:20
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Kazinsal posted:I would not expect much in the way of tangible product out of SiFive in the near future considering they fired all their engineering staff last October. That is a huge bummer but I appreciate you telling me. I didn't realize their problems were quite that massive. So, looking into options more, my best bets would appear to be: * A Loongson 3A5000 sold on AliExpress for about $400, offering the performance of an i5-750 or so and the fun and magic of an ISA that's more like MIPS64le than anything else, but with scattershot documentation, a community that largely speaks a language I simply do not know, and a toolchain that's undoubtedly worse than what I've worked with on x86, arm64, and ppc64le. Apparently you can get a test build of Debian running on it if you update the firmware... however that's accomplished. * A Sifive Hifive Unmatched, which is still being sold on Mouser for the princely sum of $740. That'd net me 16GB RAM and a motherboard that does all the things I'd hope for, but a SIMDless CPU that dukes it out with a Raspberry Pi 3. The raw speed would be infuriating compared to modern desktop class anything, but for tinkering it might be fine... * A Milk-V Pioneer, which would cost $1500 before I got a case, power supply, or drives to thwock into it and make it go. Plus it's still up for pre-order. I'll definitely keep a beady eye open for reviews, but for that kind of money I could grab an education-discounted Mac Studio and kick every other computer's rear end in my house. It's better outside of x86 than it's been for ages, but there's still a long way to go. Here's hoping for more interesting things to come. Edit: Well, heck, I just checked the official announcement and it looks like the Milk-V Oasis has a PCIe x16 slot after all. Looks like my ship is coming in near the end of the year… Hasturtium fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Feb 22, 2024 |
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Feb 21, 2024 05:03
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