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Ask HN: Does anyone care about OpenPOWER?

by sandwichbop on 2/8/24, 6:17 PM with 104 comments

• by E39M5S62 on 2/8/24, 7:30 PM

  It's simply too expensive. People that want to play around with a non-x86_64 system can buy one of a thousand different ARM devices and get all sorts of software running on it. If you want POWER, you're buying old datacenter gear with all the downsides of that class of hardware - or you're buying a Raptor system where the price has skyrocketed in recent years for aging hardware.

  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.

• by treffer on 2/8/24, 10:57 PM

  OpenPOWER happened a few years after Apple finished the transition to Intel.

  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.

• by dilippkumar on 2/8/24, 6:56 PM

  IBM is currently shipping Power10 while Raptor ships Power9 in the Talos II. If I understand correctly, they had issues getting to a fully open source firmware solution for a Talos III with a Power10 in it.

  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.

• by snovymgodym on 2/8/24, 7:23 PM

  The Talos stuff is cool but it's priced way too high for anyone who isn't taking a business expense tax deduction for it. Especially post 2020, the pricing for their products has gone way up.

  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?

• by ensignavenger on 2/8/24, 6:52 PM

  There are some people who care, otherwise it wouldn't even be a thing... but as you say, it doesn't get a lot of attention. I think it would be interesting to hear why? Why do companies implementing RISC-V and actively working on developing it not choose OpenPOWER instead? For that matter, OpenSPARC? I am not well enough versed in instruction sets to really comment, but I would love to hear more from anyone in the know?

  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?

• by bobsmith432 on 2/8/24, 7:24 PM

  If a company is serious about making POWER based SBCs or motherboards that are affordable yet fast enough for enthusiasts (no ECC, commonly used components), there would be a lot more interest. The price is what would make me turn away from POWER, as much as I love it and the ability for it to be based on completely open hardware. Someone with a lot of new ideas and a lot of energy doing something crazy like x86 binary translation or a Cell-styled CPU would also bring more attention to the platform.

  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/

• by russell_h on 2/8/24, 10:56 PM

  I always assumed that Google was putting just enough money into OpenPOWER to keep the vendors interested, as a means of gaining leverage when negotiating with Intel.

  I haven't kept up, but competition from AMD, ARM and RISC-V all probably fit that need now.

• by MassPikeMike on 2/8/24, 10:23 PM

  One very interesting project built on OpenPOWER, but with unique vector extensions, is LibreSOC, https://libre-soc.org/. It promises to be fully open hardware as well.

• by awilfox on 2/9/24, 5:58 AM

  I care deeply, and was one of the early adopters of the Talos. I do my graphics and design work on an iMac G5, still. Power is the hill I'm willing to die on, technologically speaking. The bi-endianness matters a lot to me. I prefer to do my development on BE, and I get hardware accelerated LE VMs for free on Power.

  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.

• by chasil on 2/8/24, 7:14 PM

  I think that POWER in gaming was drowned by AMD, and ARM suffocated it everywhere else.

  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.

• by wmf on 2/8/24, 6:43 PM

  It's crazy expensive, Raptor torched their own roadmap, and no one actually needs what they're selling. (People say they do, but 99% of those people haven't actually bought it.)

• by RustyRussell on 2/9/24, 11:09 AM

  Despite the brilliant work by some IBM engineers (much from my ex-colleagues at OzLabs) there was no strategy to get commodity Open power. Even opening up was more a "throw over the wall" rather than a sustained effort.

  Developing a proper Linux little-endian ABI was a major engineering feat, across kernel and toolchain, but nobody understood what to do with it.

• by SpecialistK on 2/8/24, 7:50 PM

  I suspect IBM opened up the ISA (and some hardware designs) because they were quickly losing market relevance. Apple and gaming have moved on, new projects will use Arm or RISC-V, so the only markets I can think of are:

  * 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.

• by kkfx on 2/8/24, 7:22 PM

  I do care about big iron, about open hardware, but... I do not have the financial firepower to help developing a computer architecture, and buying expensive iron with limited software support is not much interesting. At least if some major distro do support OpenPower as a tier-1 arch, meaning almost all packages are there, updated at the same speed (almost, at least) of amd64 well... I can buy a classic workstation and making that a main personal desktop. I can't do much more otherwise...

  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.

• by phendrenad2 on 2/8/24, 7:56 PM

  OpenPOWER has no advantages over RISC-V. The performance is going to be the same given the same level of investment into the silicon design. These are just ISAs, and a lot more goes into CPU design to make them fast.

• by moody__ on 2/9/24, 10:11 PM

  I really wanted to. I was working on getting a POWER64 port of 9front going, so far I have most of userspace compiling and linking but nothing for a kernel. A friend of mine had a Raptor Talos 2 that was having some issues that he sent over to me to try to use. I did a bunch of debugging of it and concluded there must be some issue with the motherboard. I have tried to contact Raptor some number of times to see what it would cost/take to get this machines repaired but have heard nothing. I've tried their irc channels and support tickets ... nothing back. This experience didn't make me confident in spending the money on a new machine.

  In the meantime I have tried to do some work with QEMU but I ran in to some snag in understanding exactly how "hypervisor" mode works according to the POWER9 manual. It has some confusing conditions about hypervisor mode and managing the page table, I had tried to join the IBM mailing list for openpower and had asked to see if someone could explain how the hypervisor mode worked more comprehensively, but got nothing back. Of course there really isn't a wealth of information to help me figure this out the otherwise.

  I say this because both of these were symptoms of the same problem. POWER is really not hobbyist friendly, both in investment cost and in support. There just isn't enough of an ecosystem in my experience.

• by h2odragon on 2/8/24, 6:22 PM

  $6,804.74 for that system.

  This is for people who want IBM + total auditability? Who have severe commitments to the ecosystem already?

• by MisterTea on 2/8/24, 10:29 PM

  > is there something I'm missing?

  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.

• by NikkiA on 2/9/24, 8:51 AM

  I'd prefer to buy a theoretical open-source R8000-R12000 based board*, but the only 'open source MIPS' stuff I ever see are low end R4000 and R5000 microcontrollers.

  * 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.

• by genmud on 2/9/24, 3:15 AM

  Nobody cares about it because unless you use IBM, or use it in some embedded use cases it’s irrelevant.

  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.

• by nyrikki on 2/8/24, 7:22 PM

  Hardware Decimal floating point is very useful, both for legacy and new financial systems and some numerical problems you need improved stability on.

• by rcbdev on 2/9/24, 9:14 AM

  There's a group of Italians who are well on their way to release a commercial Open Hardware PowerPC notebook, for all that's worth: https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/de/

• by kanzure on 2/8/24, 7:16 PM

  Here is a group that cares about OpenPOWER: https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/silicon-salon/libre-soc/

• by lupire on 2/9/24, 3:46 PM

  History of the world. Massive ecosystem gets better overall results than any niche alternative that might be technically superior in some dimension.

• by rurban on 2/9/24, 4:26 AM

  The ones, who should care to avoid US backdoors, built their own CPU's instead. And then came RISC-V

• by jbirer on 2/9/24, 1:19 AM

  I did, until RISC-V started emerging.

• by frabre on 2/9/24, 4:27 PM

  I care! And I know a lot of people who care, but we are still a niche sized group. I care mainly because of Raptor Computing Systems offerings, which I think are the main (only?) OpenPOWER systems available. I use a Blackbird, and I'm happy with it.

  From my own point of view, I'm willing to spend a $$$$ premium on hardware where I can have assurances that from the time I boot it, only code I authorize to run is run. Where every part of the system has code that, at least in principle, I or someone else could audit and fix. People have valuable IP stored on computers and it's worth much more than a few thousand dollars.

  If you just look at price to performance, you are missing the point. Also, the price is not out of line with other niche desktops such as Apple's or System76.

  There's not a lot of competition in this niche. The previous system that was useful was a ASUS KGPE-D16 motherboard, which could be librebooted (https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/kgpe-d16.html) I expect something new to come along in this space every 5-10 years.

  For my purposes, I haven't fought with the software ecosystem, and was able to compile the very few packages that weren't already precompiled.

  Here are some developments I think are worth noting:

  * There is a libre driver for the onboard NIC. (https://github.com/meklort/bcm5719-fw) This seems to be the only project that cares about blobs in every part of the board.

  * Dasharo https://www.dasharo.com/ providing alternative boot firmware.

  * Artic Tern, (https://www.raptorcs.com/content/AT1PC2/intro.html) which is objectively still mostly a development platform (that if you're skilled you can get to work) provides a completely libre boot environment and the possibility of controlling other peripherals using only auditable code.

  A few things have not yet made it onto the board:

  * Flexver (https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/documentation/flexve...) which would allow for verifying and auditing hardware, firmware and the boot process isn't commercially available yet.

  * Ultravisor state enabling more secure VMs is still awaiting implementation AFAIK. (https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Power_ISA/Privilege_States#Ul...)

  * I'm not aware of a lot of hardware that would take advantage of IBM CAPI 2.0 IO accelleration. Perhaps someone has some information on this.

  * I'm not sure what the status of transactional memory is, but I'm not aware of it being used in software. Perhaps someone can enlighten me on this.

  These would be nice to have, and I hope to have them in the future.

  The bottom line is that this is the only hardware currently in production that is going in the direction promised by the personal computing revolution back in the 1970s and 80s and is still capable of handling most people's current general computing needs. I write this hoping that other people like me who are reading this understand the importance of keeping hardware like this alive.