[HN Gopher] First stage POWER9 Firefox JIT passes tests
___________________________________________________________________
First stage POWER9 Firefox JIT passes tests
Author : classichasclass
Score : 204 points
Date : 2021-11-22 04:21 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.talospace.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.talospace.com)
| theodric wrote:
| Great work, but since
|
| (A) at the very least _my_ every attempt to buy a POWER9 system
| has been thwarted, mainly by the manufacturer themselves
| constraining availability or otherwise being unable to supply,
| and
|
| (B) POWER10 has IP issues that have made it unattractive to
| Raptor CS, and
|
| (C) they have in the past made noises about it not being worth
| the effort to continue to sell POWER9 systems to the public
| because of the support overhead
|
| ...I have to ask if this is effort well-spent, or if the sweat
| would be better poured into something with a more certain future.
|
| Not that RISC-V boards currently are anywhere near fast enough
| for daily driver use, but I'm leaning in that direction.
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| What are the IP issues related to POWER10? I hadn't heard about
| it.
| classichasclass wrote:
| The memory controllers required by OMI and one of the on-chip
| I/O processors (possibly for PCIe). Both are only available
| as blobs: https://www.talospace.com/2021/09/its-not-just-omi-
| thats-tro...
| classichasclass wrote:
| Author here. For me it's well spent, since this is my daily
| desktop driver. I can't comment on (C) or (A), though I agree
| (B) is a problem. But while RISC-V has a "future" (or at least
| a more distributed one) I see no system currently or in the
| near future that's anywhere in the same performance ballpark.
| The architecture has a lot of potential but it feels to me like
| it remains unrealized. OpenPOWER exists today in competitive
| specifications and notwithstanding supply chain issues, you can
| get one (I have three).
| jjcon wrote:
| Anyone want to Hollywood movie, "in English please" this for me?
| If it is at the top of HN I feel like I should understand the
| significance more.
| [deleted]
| sneeeeeed wrote:
| Intel just got BTFO.
| PaulBGD_ wrote:
| POWER9 is a family of processors. This is an announcement that
| Firefox's coding engine (for JavaScript) can run this code fast
| on those processors. It's somewhat interesting because
| OPENPOWER is a competitive alternative to Intel/AMD's processor
| architecture, and also ARM (used mostly in mobile.)
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| It makes JavaScript in Firefox running on IBM POWER9'S CPUs
| faster.
| bschne wrote:
| Between the various keywords in the title and the domain, it took
| me about a minute and a resigned click to figure out whether this
| was about browsers or rockets
| [deleted]
| nerdponx wrote:
| What's the context for this? Is there a new JIT compiler for
| Javascript in Firefox? Or is it a 3rd-party "add-on" that
| improves performance on some specific machine that this company
| makes?
| aetherspawn wrote:
| It's JIT support for the OpenPOWER architecture, which is
| interesting, but as far as I can tell isn't exactly in wide use
| right now. At least not where you might need Firefox.
| https://openpowerfoundation.org/
| detaro wrote:
| EDITED: derp, confused: There are POWER Workstations from
| _Raptor Computing Systems_ (https://www.raptorcs.com/).
| Talospace are POWER enthusiasts. Thanks amock for the
| correction.
| thuccess129 wrote:
| Isn't a better allocation of scarce engineering resources
| on the POWER platform to implement a RDP client to x86
| commodity desktop environment for the commercial consumer
| experience on the web with the benefit of offsetting and
| isolating potential security breach to that environment?
| Has anyone made the POWER CPU a raw node for crunching
| styled on the Plan 9 idea of cpu% ?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| How do POWER CPUs compare with ARM, x86, etc?
| boibombeiro wrote:
| They are target at datacenters. The last iteration has
| hardware support to decimal floating point, flexible IO
| (DDR3, DDR4, DDR5. GDDR6, HBM, PCI5, nvlink), Cores with
| SMT8, Tbps intra chip network, etc
|
| Can change the endianess at run time.
|
| Their new cache architecture is very unusual. A CPU can
| use the cache from another chip. Data is stored
| encrypted.
| falcor84 wrote:
| If the system can change the endianess at any time, does
| that mean that we should only be using palindromic data?
| Or is it that we should aim to make everything polyglotic
| such that both directions have valid but distinct
| interpretations?
|
| ;)
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| you joke but I learned at a talk comparing genetics to
| TCP networking (at HOPE, maybe 2014 or 2016, cant find it
| on the website atm) that DNA is encoded such that it
| expresses different proteins depending on which direction
| it is read, might be something to learn from
| usrusr wrote:
| Sounds like an architecture full of features you'd like
| to avoid when you want to run on battery, run as many of
| them in a datacenter of a given heat dissipation capacity
| or simply when you're big enough to tailor a CPU design
| to your needs because you can buy from a chip
| manufacturing as a service company. Truly an architecture
| for a different century.
| boibombeiro wrote:
| Most company can't afford to make custom chip at 7 nm.
|
| The IBM Power is one implementation of the Power ISA.
|
| The chips used on the mars rovers and nintendo Wii as ppc
| as well.
| bawolff wrote:
| Interesting. What would the benefit be of changing
| endianess at runtime?
|
| From an efficiency perspective does that mean the chip
| has to do both so worst of both worlds?
|
| [I dont know much about the world of cpu design, these
| might be stupid questions]
| boibombeiro wrote:
| Network application.
|
| The CPU probably works on just one endianess and convert
| the data format when reading from memory. The overhead is
| on kepping track when to do it. But Im speculating,
| havent looked into this.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's more something you'd do at boot, if you had to
| select between an OS built for one or another.
|
| The POWER ISA was used in PowerPC which was used for the
| successors of a few 68k machines (most famously the
| Macintosh) and in that case the OS was built for big-
| endian. So having big-endian support was key there.
| classichasclass wrote:
| IBM i and AIX still run big, in fact. Important for IBM's
| institutional customers.
|
| As for endian shifts, technically every OpenPOWER chip
| goes big for every OPAL call into the low-level HAL, even
| if the OS is little. The overhead is minimal. I can't
| think of much application use for that, though (per-page
| endianness which some PowerPCs supported is much more
| useful).
| floatboth wrote:
| armv8 defines the registers for changing endianness too
| :) https://developer.arm.com/documentation/den0024/a/ARMv
| 8-Regi... Cortex cores at least do support switching
| endianness for data in userspace (SCTLR_EL1.E0E)
| my123 wrote:
| > Cortex cores at least do support switching endianness
| for data in userspace (SCTLR_EL1.E0E)
|
| Yeah, Cortex and NVIDIA cores do (and probably quite some
| others).
|
| However, Apple-designed recent cores don't implement big
| endian support at all.
| amock wrote:
| The man behind talospace.com doesn't make workstations, he
| has one from https://raptorcs.com/. He's a PowerPC
| enthusiast.
| josephg wrote:
| I'm missing a lot of context. Can someone explain why POWER9
| is interesting?
|
| Is OpenPOWER trying to compete with RISC-V? Whats the benefit
| compared to modern ARM or x86_64 silicon & ISAs?
| loeg wrote:
| It's trying to compete with x86.
| melony wrote:
| It is interesting as Raptor is one of the few production
| ready commercial computing hardware providers that offers
| full source code of its firmware.
|
| https://git.raptorcs.com/git/
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > Can someone explain why POWER9 is interesting
|
| From my point of view it is interesting because it provides
| an alternative to x86 and ARM. The more competition, the
| better. Competition will push the hardware forward. Imagine
| we only had only one CPU architecture and one CPU maker.
|
| We have far less CPU architectures than we used to have.
| spijdar wrote:
| POWER9 is interesting (compared to RISC-V) because, right
| now, you can buy up to a 24 core, SMT4 system (96 threads),
| running dual CPU sockets if you like, and supporting up to
| 1 TB of memory per socket, with a maximum boosted clock
| speed of 3.8 GHz.
|
| All this with fully open firmware, and an open ISA (as of
| the last couple years). The CPU implementation itself is
| not open, but all firmware and procedures for initializing
| the CPU are open. For people interested in that sort of
| thing, it's appealing as a practical computer with a full
| PCIe implementation with actually decent performance,
| compared to essentially every other open source platform.
| classichasclass wrote:
| In fact, you could get a Talos II with dual 22-core CPUs
| for a whopping 176 threads, even. Raptor has them in
| stock.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Are the prices of these CPUs comparable to x86 CPUs with
| similar performance?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| In a sense they are, because with those core counts,
| you're comparing to Epyc and Xeon, which are similarly
| very expensive.
|
| What they're really missing is a midrange product for a
| midrange price. I can't blame them for avoiding the low
| end, but can't I get _anything_ for less than $2000?
| avhception wrote:
| While you're right, that's certainly not by choice but
| rather stems from the fact that right now, workstation-
| class OpenPOWER boards are a rather small market. You
| have to design the board for this server-class chip and
| break even on the costs for that + manufacturing a board
| that can actually hold these kind of chips.
|
| So while it's unfortunate, it's not a case of ignoring
| the low end deliberately but mostly flows from the
| economic realities of not having anywhere near the
| addressable market of x86 or ARM. The small community of
| ppc64(le) enthusiasts is very much hoping for a future
| where this changes, however small that chance might be...
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I've just tried looking on ebay. Nothing is to be found
| at decent (as in decent for tinkerers) prices.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Catch 22: Either the hardware could still be used in some
| system, so used stuff is expensive because some companies
| pay through the nose for spares, or the hardware is way
| too old for that, in which case it's an expensive
| collector's item. If it's very old and common it goes in
| the crusher.
|
| This seems to be universally true for all kinds of UNIX
| workstations and servers.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| > If it's very old and common it goes in the crusher.
|
| Repeat until the hardware is rare and worth something?
| classichasclass wrote:
| This is what Microwatt is intended to address, though you
| have to synthesize it yourself. With luck Arctic Tern
| will give you the playaround board you'd like.
| https://www.talospace.com/2021/10/first-flight-of-
| kestrel-fp...
| [deleted]
| loeg wrote:
| They're more expensive, especially factoring in the
| motherboard. But as a sibling points out, it's not like
| HEDT is inexpensive from any vendor.
| [deleted]
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| and you can get a 64 core AMD Threadripper 3990X with
| 128x PCI-e v4 which makes the Talos II very moot.
| officeplant wrote:
| The customers picking up Talos II boards won't be
| interested until you can show them a threadripper/epyc
| system with coreboot.
|
| IIRC some of the latest AMD boards to end up with
| coreboot support is using opterons from 2011-2013.
| bildung wrote:
| When did they make Threadripper open source?
| mhh__ wrote:
| Neither _processor_ is open source
| spijdar wrote:
| Precisely. Since there's no equivalent of the Power ISA
| in "x86 land", it's hard to make a direct comparison (I
| don't believe that _formally_ Intel or AMD consider
| themselves to share an architecture, and they both have
| slightly different instruction sets), but the closest
| comparison would be if AMD or Intel released the source
| code for PSP or ME respectively, along with all other
| ancillary firmware and documentation for the bring-up
| procedures so that, without an NDA or business agreement,
| a third party could design a motherboard around a
| Threadripper or Xeon CPU, provide that to a customer, and
| allow the customer to make modifications to the firmware
| running on that motherboard.
| avhception wrote:
| While that may be true from a cost/performance point of
| view, the point of the Talos is to keep the system as
| transparent as possible (schematics, open source firmware
| etc.). If that is not a concern for you it doesn't matter
| I guess. But for some people it is, and the Talos is the
| most attractive board out there from a performance point
| of view if that kind of transparency is a thing for you.
| voldacar wrote:
| I don't think you understand the point of the talos
| gnufx wrote:
| > you can buy up to a 24 core, SMT4 system (96 threads)
|
| For what it's worth: $ lscpu | head -5
| Architecture: ppc64le Byte Order:
| Little Endian CPU(s): 160
| On-line CPU(s) list: 0-159 Thread(s) per core:
| 4
| tomrod wrote:
| Likewise. I can tell the author is excited about it, but I
| don't have enough domain knowledge to understand the context.
| Is this a WASM extension?
| spijdar wrote:
| The first thing to know is there's a community of people
| using POWER9 workstations, whether for actual "work" or just
| as personal computers for, well, personal use. In both cases,
| web browsers are very important.
|
| These devices support basically all the DRM GPU drivers in
| Linux, and when coupled with Mesa, have very fast and
| responsive GUIs. Both Firefox and Chromium run well, but up
| until now, Firefox has been using a pure interpreter to run
| javascript. This is fine for sites not using much javascript,
| but a big chunk of the modern web quite literally loads
| megabytes worth of JS on a page, and it can really chug under
| the interpreter.
|
| So it's pretty exciting that we'll have a second browser with
| a proper JS engine, Chromium being the first (IBM ported V8
| to ppc64le, for node.js, but the port works for running
| chromium as well)
|
| Also because it may not be clear, the other big arches all
| already have JIT compilers. x86, amd64, 32 and 64 bit ARM,
| (and I think MIPS does, on either chromium or firefox, don't
| recall), so this is less about boosting performance, and more
| about reaching "baseline expected performance".
| classichasclass wrote:
| MIPS has a JIT on both, though it's mipsle, not "classic"
| BE MIPS like sgimips. It's more targeted to CPUs like
| Loongson.
|
| Anyway, I'm trying to go as fast as I can to get an actual
| browser mounted. But passing the test suites in totality,
| run two different ways, suggests a high probability of
| success at this point.
| spijdar wrote:
| Greatly looking forward to it. Thanks for all your work
| on Firefox and PowerPC at-large. Being able to use
| Firefox for the JS heavy sites I've had to use Chromium
| for will be very, very nice. :-)
| marcodiego wrote:
| Is there a surplus/used market where one can buy a talos II for a
| better price?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Since POWER9 and OpenSPARC are open architectures with open ISAs,
| I don't see why companies like Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba aren't
| using them and trying instead to build CPUs based on ARM. Is
| there a much better performance/power ration which can be
| achieved by ARM and not by POWER or SPARC?
| fomine3 wrote:
| We can't buy Cortex/Neoverse equivalent modern core design on
| POWER/SPARC
| [deleted]
| rakoo wrote:
| I know they design their parts, but do they actually assemble
| them ? If not, how many fabs can build ARM boards compared to
| POWER or SPARC boards ? Is the performance/power ratio so
| important compared to the price of being tied to fewer
| companies ?
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Do you mean boards or chips? "Fabs" as typically referenced
| in the industry refers to wafer fabs.
| volta83 wrote:
| An ISA is like a platform.
|
| It is valuable only if it has many users, e.g., application
| code, optimized for the ISA.
|
| HW's job is to then run that code with good perf/cost.
|
| OpenPOWER has little software. ARM has a lot of software.
|
| So from that POV, ARM is already many orders of magnitude more
| valuable than OpenPOWER.
|
| But it doesn't end there. Do you need some software to be
| extremely optimized for ARM? ARM can do this for you at
| resonable price, no need to hire.
|
| Also, for OpenPOWER, you need to hire 50-100 Facebook
| engineers, at 400k$/year, and it'll take them >3 years to
| produce a chip design, which then needs to be verified, etc.
| and then needs to be built, so you'll need a fab, specialized
| on OpenPOWER, or not. A fab churns 40k chips/month, so how many
| chips / month do these companies need ?
|
| With ARM, you pick one of the many ARM farms, and there is
| little for you to do. And you get 5 engineers, and they just
| customize an ARM design to your needs. And they ship in 1 year
| instead of 3. And next year ARM gives you a way to update your
| chip to the next generation. And if next year you need some
| other feature, ARM gives it to you. And if you need software,
| like C library, profilers, math, all that is supplied by Arm.
|
| And they take royalties on chips you built, and.... and....
|
| So ARM is many orders of magnitude cheaper in perf / $ than
| OpenPower. Not only is the hardware better, but it is better,
| cheaper, has more software, and tools, and teams of experts
| ready to help your team, etc.
| anthk wrote:
| >OpenPOWER has little software. ARM has a lot of software.
|
| Most Linux software has being ported over.
| volta83 wrote:
| Works is step 0.
|
| Works efficiently is step 10000.
|
| x86 is at step 10000, ARM at step 5000, power is at step 0.
|
| Firefox "worked" before this post on power. Now somebody
| put enough effort to actually make it usable.
|
| The fact that you don't see people complaining about
| Firefox PowerPC performance on Linux is not because
| performance was good - it was unusably slow - but because
| nobody uses Firefox on Power.
|
| Think about what that means. Think about how many bugs in
| Firefox are reported _every day_ for x86 and ARM, and how
| many are reported for PowerPC. Is that also because the
| PowerPC version has no bugs? (no, it is because nobody uses
| it, nobody reports them, and nobody fixes them).
| gnufx wrote:
| If the implication is that POWER is somehow new, I first
| used it when it was RS/6000 and introduced FMA. There was
| subsequently a rather large installation at my lab.
| Firefox without the JIT is only a problem with the
| "modern" web, and I default to turning off Javascript
| anyway, and I guess someone uses it to make it worth
| porting.
| classichasclass wrote:
| Well, ahem, _somebody_ does try to fix them, and we _do_
| get reports which get triaged (I know this, because I 've
| done a number of the fixes, some of which were not
| trivial). There are much fewer of them, which I think is
| your point, but there aren't _none_ , and there isn't
| _nobody_ who cares. I think you 're overplaying your hand
| here.
| DCKing wrote:
| > x86 is at step 10000, ARM at step 5000, power is at
| step 0.
|
| I agree with your general point, but I do believe that
| Power is the most "practical" ISA after x86 and ARM -
| albeit it's a distant third, it's definitely not at 0. It
| has the full support of a bunch of mainstream distros,
| public container registries have a decent amount of
| support for their images, and people actually run pretty
| serious workloads on Linux on Power.
|
| Power does have a lot of niche backing, albeit it's
| continuously being hurt by IBM's total lack of interest
| in doing anything but push it beyond the billion dollar
| contracts they're milking with it. That's totally
| destroying any mindshare Power has. There's really no way
| to get a cloud shell on a modern Power machine, or
| physical access to a modern one without forking over
| thousands of dollars for the privilege (the latter only
| really is possible due to Talos' amazing efforts, bless
| em).
| classichasclass wrote:
| At one of the OpenPOWER summits they referred to the
| Raptor workstations as the "low end systems." I laughed
| and then I cried.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| Most Linux software doesn't need porting at all - just
| recompiling.
| acdha wrote:
| Prior to this work, Firefox was also ported in the sense
| that it ran but it was much slower because it had not been
| optimized. How much of the software which has been compiled
| for Power has been well-tested, much less optimized?
| api wrote:
| Is ISA lock-in really an issue today?
|
| Porting most software to ARM64, Power, or RISC-V involves
| typing some variation of "make." Only a small percentage of
| software written in C/C++ or ASM is problematic. Anything in
| a higher level language like Go or a newer language like Rust
| is generally 100% portable.
|
| Switching from X86_64 to ARM64 (M1) for my desktop dev system
| was trivial.
|
| Endian-ness used to bite, but today virtually everything is
| little-endian above embedded. Power and some ARM support both
| modes but almost always run in little-endian mode (e.g.
| ppc64le).
| enedil wrote:
| Endianess is not the only problem. You can have issues with
| different cache coherency model, different alignment
| requirements, different syscalls (which are partially arch-
| dependent, at least on Linux). The fact that the switch
| from x86 to arm was trivial just proves the point that arm
| has matured really well.
| anthk wrote:
| OpenBSD and Linux already sorted that.
| acdha wrote:
| How? For example, a different memory model isn't
| something you can just flip a switch to fix -- someone
| needs to review/test application code to see whether it
| has latent bugs which are masked (or simply harder to
| reproduce) on x86. Apple went to the trouble implementing
| support in their silicon to avoid that but if you don't
| run on similar hardware it's likely that you'll hit some
| issue in this regard for any multithreaded program, and
| those are exactly the kinds of bugs which people are
| going to miss in a simple cross-compile with limited
| testing.
| tedunangst wrote:
| You think Firefox ported their jit to power simply by
| typing make?
| volta83 wrote:
| - Have you ever, e.g., computed the sinus of a floating
| point number in C (sinf) ?
|
| - Have you ever multiplied a matrix with a vector, or a
| matrix with a matrix (GEMM) using BLAS?
|
| - Have you ever done an FFT ?
|
| - Have you used C++ barriers? Or pthreads? Or mutexes?
|
| An optimized implementation achieves ~100% of theoretical
| peak performance of a CPU on all of those, and these are
| all tailored to each CPU model.
|
| There is software on any running system doing those things
| all the time. Running at 0% of the peak just means
| increased power consumption, latency, time to finish, etc.
|
| Generic versions perform at < 100%, often at ~0% (0.1%,
| 0.001%, etc.) of theoretical peak.
|
| Somebody has to write software for doing this things for
| the actual hardware, so that you can then call them from
| python.
|
| IBM has dozens of "open source" bounties open for PowerPC,
| and they pay real $$$, but nobody implements them.
|
| ---
|
| Porting software to PowerPC is only as simple as doing make
| if the libraries your software uses (the C standard
| library, the libm library, BLAS, etc. ) all have optimized
| implementations, which isn't the case.
|
| So when considering PowerPC, you have to divide the paper
| numbers by 100 if you want to get the actual numbers normal
| code recompiled with make gets in practice. And then you
| have to invest extra $$$ into improving that software,
| cause nobody will do it for you.
| gnufx wrote:
| Er, no. I do that stuff (well, I'm not clever enough for
| C++ generally, and it would be OpenMP rather than plain
| pthreads) on the sort of nodes that Sierra uses. However
| they mostly use the GPUs, for which POWER9 has particular
| support. Then I can tell there isn't currently any GEMV
| or FFT running on this system, and not "all the time"
| even on our HPC nodes.
|
| While it isn't necessarily clear what peak performance
| means, MKL or OpenBLAS, for instance, is only ~100% of
| serial peak on large DGEMM for a value of 100 = 90; ESSL
| is similar. I haven't measured GEMV (ultimately memory-
| bound), but I got ~75% of hand-optimized DGEMM
| performance on Haswell with pure C, and I'd expect
| similar on POWER if I measured. Those orders of magnitude
| are orders off, even for, say, reference BLAS. I don't
| know why I need Python, but the software clearly exists
| -- all those things and more (like vectorized libm). You
| can even compile assorted x86 intrinsics on POWER, though
| I don't know how well they perform relative to on
| equivalent x86, but I think you're typically better off
| with an optimizing compiler anyway.
|
| I've packaged a lot of HPC/research software, which is
| almost all available for ppc64le; the only things missing
| are dmtcp, proot, and libxsmm (if libsmm isn't good
| enough).
| PedroBatista wrote:
| With ARM you have a World of resources, with POWER or SPARC you
| have 2 abandoned platforms. There's a reason they are "open"
| now and nobody wants to hold that bag.
| hulitu wrote:
| With ARM you have a world of blobs.
| broodbucket wrote:
| POWER definitely isn't abandoned lol, POWER10 shipped last
| month.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| Then SPARC isn't abandoned either, but I think you know
| what I meant compared to ARM.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Er, when did SPARC last have a new version?
| PedroBatista wrote:
| 2017 or 2018 I think, but Fujitsu was going to release a
| new version this year.
| donatzsky wrote:
| As others have already said, ARM has the economy of scale which
| POWER doesn't have. And SPARC seems to be dead.
|
| Also, ARM has always (?) been about getting the most out of
| limited resources, whereas POWER is about performance at any
| cost. With modern ARM designs, the performance is getting close
| to, and even exceeding, that of traditional desktop and server
| CPUs, while still being frugal with resources. POWER is still,
| well, power-hungry.
| Twirrim wrote:
| Agreed. Power frugality is absolutely crucial, especially at
| larger, enterprise scale. Unless you're in HPC, you're
| looking for a good balance of peak performance-per-watt _and_
| the lowest idle consumption, with a very good scaling down
| story. ARM has long done a better job of this than x86. It 's
| one of the main reasons the chipset has been absolutely
| dominant in the smartphone market.
|
| The biggest single cost for AWS etc. is per-rack running
| costs, encompassing power, cooling etc. It's hard to
| overemphasise just how much this dwarfs all other costs. To
| optimise those costs you've got to cut down the power
| consumption and associated heat production.
| ksec wrote:
| One could also ask why people are using / pushing Rust and
| RISC-V over Ada and OpenPOWER. The latter are simply not cool,
| gets nothing on their Resume Driven Development. And no
| companies wants to bet on it because without other company
| sharing some cost of ecosystem no one can sustain it by
| themselves. ( That is why we need marketing )
|
| And finally, what benefits does POWER and SPARC brings to the
| table? The licensing cost from ARM is tiny in the grand scheme
| of things. I like open ISAs like POWER and OpenSPARC, but from
| a business POV it just doesn't make any sense.
| gnufx wrote:
| > what benefits does POWER and SPARC brings to the table
|
| Radiation hardened implementations, e.g. spacecraft, is one
| niche, though I don't know whether that has anything
| particular to do with the ISA.
| ksec wrote:
| Radiation hardening are mostly done with mature old node
| with less error rate and packaging. There are additional
| compute to check if results are correct ( I remember it was
| n+2 ? ). So nothing to do with ISA itself ( at least as far
| as I know ).
| pjc50 wrote:
| The instruction set is not as critical as you might think, and
| ARM has the huge advantage of a lot of working implementations
| which you can already buy.
|
| Semiconductor design teams don't exactly grow on trees, either.
| It was over a decade from Apple buying PA Semi whole
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi ) to announcing the
| M1.
|
| And of course if you're going to do that you already need the
| rest of the vertically integrated pipeline to build
| motherboards to put your chips on, peripheral IP to do all the
| other things other than processing, etc.
| Someone wrote:
| ARM also has lots of sometimes hand-optimized software that
| may not be available or as good as for those other platforms.
|
| I haven't checked, but I don't expect Power to have good USB
| support, for example.
|
| I also think Power targets a different performance range than
| ARM.
|
| Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSPARC and
| https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-
| overvi..., both of which mention no news after 2008,
| OpenSPARC looks on its deathbed to me.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Quite. I can't think of any reason other than
| retrocomputing that someone would want an OpenSPARC.
|
| I think people forget that the economies are different with
| hardware vs software; because you cannot eradicate the per-
| unit cost of hardware, paying a small part of that in
| license fees is not a big deal, especially since it comes
| with integration support that saves you a lot of non-
| recurring R&D expense. Whereas in software, being free
| makes it zero-friction and this has a _huge_ impact on
| adoption.
| anthk wrote:
| Linux and BSD drivers are multiplatform by design. They
| work on PPC, Intel, ARM, and RISC-V.
| classichasclass wrote:
| I would think USB would be more of a OS issue, though. If a
| USB driver came as a blob, my Talos II obviously couldn't
| run it, but otherwise pretty much all USB stuff just works
| if I have source code for it (Fedora). Page size can ruin
| your day for some devices -- I have to hack FireWire, for
| example, because it assumes a 4K page size and Fedora uses
| 64K pages -- but so far no issues with USB or AMD GPUs.
|
| Optimization is a bigger issue, though autovectorization in
| compilers is making it less of a problem than it used to
| be, as well as us nerd pioneers getting things upstreamed.
| gnufx wrote:
| Although it's one of the "different" things, along with
| memory model, the page size is the same for Fedora
| aarch64 if I remember the discussion right.
|
| Is POWER9 compilation generally poor compared with other
| targets? It didn't seem so to me, apart from a
| pathological case on one benchmark set which IBM
| addressed swiftly. They've been supporting GCC for rather
| a long time.
| classichasclass wrote:
| That used to be the case until
| https://www.spinics.net/linux/fedora/fedora-
| kernel/msg12805.... which put aarch64 to 4K. I argue
| there should be a workstation ppc64le spin that does
| this, but I understand why Fedora doesn't want to put the
| releng resources towards a niche audience.
|
| I agree IBM's autovector stuff is quite good in gcc but
| there's no substitute for hand-rolled assembly sometimes.
| gnufx wrote:
| https://libre-soc.org/ is perhaps interesting in the POWER
| space.
| spullara wrote:
| Yes. Otherwise people would be using them.
| ggrrhh_ta wrote:
| Are you saying that you get better performance vs. power with
| ARMs than with POWERs?
| rbanffy wrote:
| I would be sure you would for any off-the-shelf open
| designs. POWER9 and POWER10 are power-hungry (no pun
| intended) but are very powerful (I will neither confirm nor
| deny wether a pun was intended here), more than any ARM
| server option.
| volta83 wrote:
| How many smartphones using POWERs do you know?
|
| Or IoT devices?
|
| Or...
|
| Or...
| donatzsky wrote:
| Would it even be possible to fit a POWER CPU in a
| smartphone?
| classichasclass wrote:
| For "big POWER" like POWER8/9/10, they are clearly not
| positioned at that market. However, there are small Power
| ISA chips for embedded systems and companies like NXP
| still make them (the Amiga community even tries to
| shoehorn these into desktop systems, to their detriment,
| IMHO), and IBM has done "little POWER" versions of big
| POWER chips (the G5 being a scaled-down POWER4 with
| AltiVec, for example).
| MisterTea wrote:
| > (the Amiga community even tries to shoehorn these into
| desktop systems, to their detriment, IMHO)
|
| What detriment would that be?
| classichasclass wrote:
| The long version is
| https://www.talospace.com/2020/01/another-amiga-you-dont-
| wan... but the tl;dr version is that the Amiga diehards
| who would buy this still want to use Amiga as their daily
| drivers, yet these are CPUs that a 15-year-old-plus Power
| Mac would mop the floor with. It's just handing their
| detractors another stick for a fresh beating. As a
| strictly retrocomputing solution that wouldn't be a
| problem, but that's not how these newer Amigas are
| positioned and by playing into the "Power is
| dead/underpowered" trope they're bad for the community as
| a whole.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Yes?
|
| https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-
| microcontrollers...
|
| Is 3W is small enough for ya?
| ggrrhh_ta wrote:
| From the replies I see that the focus is mostly on embedded
| and/or consumer. I understand the point then.
| HerbsMan wrote:
| My Quad G5 can't wait to take a ride :)
| amock wrote:
| This is very exciting. The missing JIT has made web browsing much
| less pleasant than it should be and is currently the the only
| significant issue I have with my POWER9 workstation.
| classichasclass wrote:
| Hey, thanks!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-22 23:02 UTC)