
PowerPC Notebook Block Diagram - ingve
https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/2017/11/powerpc-notebook-block-diagram-done/
======
turblety
Every day, more and more people are understanding just how little control they
have over the processors that run in their Intel and AMD chips [1][2]. Maybe
soon there will be enough people who care to stop giving Intel and AMD money
and fund projects like these ones.

OpenPOWER seems to be quite open and free. Normally it's quite expensive
though, although their main products seem to be aimed at servers.

Thought saying that, you always pay. Pay hard cash for a computer, or pay your
privacy and freedom.

1\.
[https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intelme](https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intelme)

2\. [https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd](https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd)

~~~
jchw
It's a balancing act. I don't believe I need absolute 100% control of all
things going on in my computer; if I did, I wouldn't be able to utilize it
anyways. It's pretty telling that Intel ME has been largely invisible to even
savvy users until recently.

Having competition is probably part of what's needed to ensure that there's
some control. The problem is that none of the competition is currently
approaching it from a user freedom standpoint. After all, most companies
making processors are publicly traded and even if they weren't, need to sell a
huge volume of them to break even and have decent per-unit costs. So trying to
target what is unfortunately a very tiny niche of users isn't going to go
well.

And for the truly paranoid, it's impossible to prove that the processor wasn't
tampered with, that there isn't a ring below yours. You can really only ever
get to the point of being able to reasonably doubt the existence of it, which
won't satisfy everyone.

I think Intel is digging its own grave by taking the worst stances on issues
of user freedom. Eventually, if Intel ME's power over the machine continues to
increase, something bad is going to happen as a result of it, and it's going
to erode the already fragile trust people have in them. The ME exploit was
part 1 of that.

But what about companies like AMD, or the hundreds of ARM manufacturers that
take a more passive route of not caring about user freedom? There's no
imaginable consequence for that. And there's no real benefit of reversing
course, either. I can't see a future where open computing will be anything
more than an extreme niche with sub-par options.

One of the better scenarios I can think of is that computing as we know it
today becomes a niche itself and a lot of the users do value privacy and
security. This seems plausible the better that Chromebooks and phones and
tablets get; the average user won't need a computer tower or a laptop with 16
GB of RAM. But I imagine it won't be good news for the prices we currently
enjoy :)

~~~
userbinator
_or the hundreds of ARM manufacturers that take a more passive route of not
caring about user freedom?_

I think ARM SoCs are even worse. Try finding a full (or just partial)
datasheet/technical documentation for anything like the ones used in recent
smartphones and tablets, for example. They are going to want a NDA. The only
ones publicly available were leaked. They also differ significantly between
each other and often even within the same model line, so it's nothing like a
PC where a lot of things still remain relatively standard.

ARM also has TrustZone, their DRM technology of which there is almost no
public documentation.

~~~
sweden
TrustZone is not DRM nor a management engine like Intel's ME. It is just a
reference design in order to implement some sort of sandbox and security zone
in the SoC.

ARM doesn't mandate how TrustZone is used, it just provides the technology. If
SoC designers use it to force DRM into their products, it's not really ARM's
fault.

Also, just to make it clear, it is not ARM's fault if ARM based SoCs lack
proper documentation.

~~~
subway
It's at least partially ARM's fault, as ARM doesn't publish documentation for
their cores. SoC vendors are just as bad, if not worse, but ARM doesn't get
off scott-free.

~~~
pm215
Eh? Here's the TRM for the Cortex-A57, to pick the first arm core I thought
of:
[https://developer.arm.com/docs/ddi0488/c/preface](https://developer.arm.com/docs/ddi0488/c/preface)
The architecture manuals are also downloadable.

~~~
subway
And Mali?

------
j-pb
I'm not sure if this was posted here to make fun of how little progress
they've made in 3 months, to commend them how much progress they've made, or
to just introduce the project.

I am confused, impressed that somebody still wants to make a powerpc laptop,
but also underwhelmed by what essentially amounts to a generic description of
a computer.

~~~
stmw
Well, the diagram itself wasn't that interesting, but sounds like they did a
lot of work on the BoM and such, which is could easily take that long even for
folks who have done it before.

------
aequitas
"Why PowerPC?: The PowerPC architecture design is newer than the other
successful CPU architectures. ..."

This if like saying a screensaver of a fire is better than actual fire in your
fireplace since its newer. Ignoring the fact it doesn't come close to half the
features of a real fire (except for maybe the risk of burning your house
down).

But as a long term Apple user from before the the x86 era I can't deny there
sentiment of going with the underdog :)

~~~
gcb0
i'd guess you can emulate a PPC (for non-memory intensive tasks) on a modern
x86 faster and with less power than running a PPC natively. I might be
completely off. and with parallelization and containers fad, which benefit a
lot from memory and context changes, they would have more luck funding servers
for VM farms than laptops.

~~~
saagarjha
Huh? Emulation is always slower than anything running natively on comparable
hardware, since there's an extra layer of abstraction. Do you mean something
else here?

~~~
gcb0
nope. mean exactly it. You forget the fact that x86 is leaps ahead on clock
speed of any PPC.

if you are at 1/8th of the bare metal performance, ona top of the line average
x86 cpu from today, you still have more than the best PPC money can buy.

Even for memory and IO intensive tasks, where they are supposed to shine
because of the obscenely huge in-cpu caches (when compared to x86) if you
remember that the PPC state of the art IO standard is from 2004 and it could
barely handle dual gigabit NICs.

I might be completely off and not knowing newer PPC offerings, but I doubt
there are any since the early 2000's, when i last looked into all this.

tl;dr there is no "comparable" ppc in terms of clock speed to x86.

~~~
saagarjha
As expected, my laptop blows what was arguably the "fastest" PowerPC computer
out of the water:
[http://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2/compare/1989293/2644...](http://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench2/compare/1989293/2644827).
However, I'm not sure this difference is enough for emulation to work at
native speed. Taking the Wii (which used PowerPC) as an example, it wasn't
until recently that most computers could handle emulating it without a
significant frameskip. The G5 is much more powerful than 729 MHz Broadway that
the Wii had.

------
hapless
These guys are working with an Amiga vendor who has done a series of designs
around the Applied Micro PowerPC 440 series SoCs (systems-on-a-chip). The
block diagram clearly indicates an SoC. (IBM POWER, the fast PPC chips, are
not SoCs!)

I infer that this is another PPC 440 design. Those chips top out at 1.2 GHz
with just a couple cores, and they are a legacy product as far as Applied
Micro is concerned -- AM is now focused on their ARM products.

At best, this project is a very pokey laptop from a near-dead Amiga OEM. At
worst, it's a scam.

~~~
mcbridematt
I suspect it is a NXP/Freescale T-series, 2x64-bit DDR4 and PCIe3.0 lanes
lines up with the T4240.

[https://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and-
processors...](https://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and-
processors/applications-processors/qoriq-
platforms/t-series/qoriq-t4240-t4160-t4080-multicore-communications-
processors:T4240)

These are popular CPU's in the networking world, but Freescale halted further
PowerPC core development in favour of licensing cores from ARM.

------
Ecco
I quite don't understand the appeal. If you want a PPC laptop, just buy an
iBook G4, they sell for $30 on eBay…

~~~
jchw
I'm guessing POWER has surpassed what a laptop from 2003 can do since the
iBook G4 was released. What if you want a better display? More expansion? A
GPU? Bluetooth 4? I'd be surprised if an iBook G4 can run a modern Linux
stack.

~~~
floatboth
It can run Ubuntu-MATE 16.04, OpenBSD, MorphOS and more.

It's barely usable for web browsing. Even with upgraded hardware (1.25GB RAM
and a CF card instead of hard drive) Firefox on Ubuntu and TenFourFox on Mac
OS X Tiger are really damn slow. OWB (WebKit) on MorphOS is a bit better, but
still not what I'd use for everyday work.

~~~
mattkevan
Yeah, I was really hoping Linux could resurrect my old PowerBook G4. It had
great specs for its day and was still in great shape.

After trying a whole load of options, Lubuntu 14.04 was the best but there
wasn’t anything which provided a modern web experience.

I briefly thought of trying to make a Raspberry Pi casemod with it before
realising how hard it would be - seemed a shame to get rid of a perfectly good
screen and enclosure just because the processor is no longer supported.

------
dawnbreez
Unfortunately, the first question that popped into my head was not "awesome, a
processor that won't spy on me" but "will it be x86 compatible?".

I know, it's heresy--you should only need open-source software, and as long as
you can get a compiler running, open source software should work. However, the
vast majority of users simply won't _care_ , not if they have to give up their
favorite software. "I can't use Photoshop? But I _need_ it!"

If you want an open processor to take off, it'll need some kind of x86
compatibility.

~~~
tom_mellior
Wine+QEMU seems to be a reasonable way of executing many Windows programs on
non-x86-64, non-Windows platforms. Alternatively, you could install a real
Windows in a full-system emulator and run on that.

It's not like there are no options at all.

~~~
stephenr
As someone who ran x86 software (primarily Windows at the time) via software
emulation (virtualpc) on production PowerPC hardware (Apple PowerMac) I have
to disagree.

If you don't need x86 compatibility, PPC is fine, and for open source stuff
it's probably reasonably well supported in major distros.

But pretending you can have anywhere close to reasonable performance of x86
binaries on even the newest PPC chips is hopeful at best and realistically a
fanciful notion.

~~~
tom_mellior
You are comparing a system simulator to an instruction set simulator. Those
are very different things.

When you run an application on QEMU on Linux, only the application code is
simulated (by just-in-time compiling every basic block when it is first
executed, then always just executing that compiled native code). System calls
go to the Linux kernel on the host system, which runs as usual. Hardware is
not virtualized. In contrast, Virtual PC (if I understand correctly) simulates
the hardware of an entire PC, including graphics hardware, and runs all of
Windows on top of that. That's a lot more expensive in terms of processing
power.

That said, sure, you will probably lose some performance with QEMU. If the
simulated code uses lots of fancy vector instructions that are not provided by
the host hardware, you'll even lose a lot.

~~~
my123
Emulating the MMU alone is quite a big issue...

~~~
tom_mellior
I don't think QEMU in instruction set emulation mode emulates the MMU. Does
it? The host system has a perfectly fine MMU. QEMU translates assembly code to
assembly code. That is all it does, as far as I know.

~~~
pm215
Correct, currently usermode QEMU does not emulate the mmu, but just has a flat
mapping of guestaddr = hostaddr + constant_base_addr. There has been some
thought of adding mmu emulation to usermode, though, as the simple fixed
mapping has problems (eg if the guest wants to map at some address where
there's already something in the host address space, or for guest archs where
the highbits of guest addresses are important like ia64).

------
microcolonel
I'm thinking that the next architecture to break into PC/mobile will probably
come through Chromebooks, but will nonetheless need a well-performing dynamic
binary translator for a popular architecture or two (better than QEMU, which
is apparently okay-but-not-great).

------
mwcampbell
If PowerPC is such a great architecture, then why did Apple transition the Mac
platform to x86 about 12 years ago? Has PowerPC gotten much better since then?

~~~
mpe
That had basically nothing to do with the _architecture_. The key reason was
likely the diverging requirements between laptop (Apple) and server (IBM)
chips.

~~~
hapless
Specifically, IBM had no real roadmap for the PPC 970 series (G5), and could
not offer pricing that matched Intel.

------
rbanffy
It's a bit sad it won't be able to compete in price with low-end laptops. I
seriously doubt the CPU is more powerful than a Core i3.

------
sengork
Just like in the 1990s PowerPC laptop was even mentioned in the movie Hackers
not to mention Apple's own devices.

------
LeonM
I see a SATA controller in the laptop, with 2 internal SATA ports for a CD and
HD, there is also a PS/2 'mouse'.

I don't get it, are they designing a 'retro' style notebook like the old
iBook? Or have the designers been sleeping under a rock for the pas 10 years?

edit: imac->ibook

~~~
dsr_
I don't understand the objection.

If these incredibly useful ports are not present, they cannot be used. If they
are present, they can be used, but you don't have to do so.

This isn't a single laptop design: this is a prototype for building lots of
different machines. If you want a NUC-style tiny brick computer, you can build
one from this. If you want a RAID server, you can build a small one directly
or a medium-sized one by adding a PCIe controller. It's never going to appeal
to an ultrabook buyer, since it would be really difficult to engineer all the
other components for ultra light weight, but you could replace the vast
majority of non-gaming cheap laptops with this.

Oh, and integrated touchpads are usually connected with PS/2, SMbus or I2C.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
> integrated touchpads are usually connected with PS/2, SMbus or I2C.

Yeah, my laptops mostly show up as PS2 devices.

So long as usb is present, I support having other ports.

