
Slimbook collaborates with the PowerPC laptop - jrepinc
https://slimbook.es/en/noticias-notas-de-prensa-y-reviews/435-slimbook-collaborates-with-the-powerpc-laptop
======
dragontamer
The link seems to be getting the YCombinator hug-of-death. I can't read the
article at all.

Since POWER9 only exists in the server / HEDT sphere, I doubt this will be a
modern POWER9 chip. Maybe something like a NXP-chip, which would still be
interesting. Something on the scale of a Chromebook maybe?

If binaries were compatible with the Talos II POWER9 HEDT / Server, then there
is still a good use of this laptop. To serve as a portable development
platform, much like Intel Atom can serve as a portable development platform
for Intel Xeons.

Depends on a lot of details however. Honestly, its probably more important to
rack-up a POWER9 Talos II and just SSH into it every once in a while... modern
cloud-based services makes this sort of thing much easier.

\----------

EDIT: Site finally worked for me. NXP T2080 chip, 4-core / 8-thread 28nm class
chip. e6500 core, which is some form of PowerPC for sure... 128-bit vector
units (Altivec). 32kB L1 d$ and 32kB L1 I$, 2MB L2$ for the whole chip.

This is older-tech for sure, definitely "Chromebook" level of tech, maybe a
touch weaker even.

EDIT2: I think there's something to be said about an "open" design, where the
schematics are available for the community to use and extend. The NXP T2080
has good GPIO pins and connectivity, so there's a chance that this laptop will
be easier to interface with electronically than other devices. Guys over at
hackaday probably would love something like this. [https://gitlab.com/oshw-
powerpc-notebook/powerpc-laptop-mobo...](https://gitlab.com/oshw-powerpc-
notebook/powerpc-laptop-
mobo/blob/master/electrical_schematic_ppc_notebook_0_2_version_09_2019.pdf)

~~~
kjs3
It's not Power.

If I followed the links correctly, it's a 1GHz-ish PPC derivative from a shop
you for whom processors are a minor part of their product line. The
motherboards linked to appear to all top out at 2GB of SoDIMM memory. So maybe
"that's cool" but not "that's generally useful" and personally not "I'll spend
money on that".

~~~
dragontamer
[https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/reference-
manual/E6500RM.pdf](https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/reference-manual/E6500RM.pdf)

> The e6500 core is a low-power, 64-bit, multi-threaded implementation of the
> resources for embedded processors defined by Power ISA

Page 3-1 lists the instruction-groups from PowerISA that the e6500 supports.

------
filmgirlcw
People are getting down-voted for asking what year it is, but I’m going to
“what year is this?”

I’m not discounting the effort that goes into place here — at least I’m trying
not to — but like, why would anyone look at PowerPC for portables in 2019 when
the whole reason Apple shifted to Intel 14 years ago was thermals? Wouldn’t
ARM be better?

I’m sure I’m missing something but I just don’t understand this on any level
except for some obsession with “openness” at the expense of actually doing
anything.

~~~
pgeorgi
> when the whole reason Apple shifted to Intel 14 years ago was thermals?
> Wouldn’t ARM be better?

The move to Intel wasn't because the instruction set is, for some reason,
superior (it isn't), it's because IBM couldn't keep up with Intel's
fabrication technology. The G5 chip from 2002 was at 130nm, while the Intel
design introduced in 2006 (when 4 year old G5 was the best IBM had to offer)
was at 65nm.

The chip they aim for is built on a 28nm process (which has some impact on
voltages used and minimum conversion of power into heat). That's definitely
not top-class, but good enough: it's about a factor 3 to the state of the art
(compared to factor 2 between G5 and Intel Core in 2006), but in absolute
terms it's so much closer.

There are enough ARM laptops out there, this provides another venue for more
vendor independence (ARM still exerts tight control over its ISA while PowerPC
is a close cousin to Power9 which was opened recently). In short, for a
project like this, the goal isn't the very best performance on the market,
it's "the more the merrier".

~~~
IOT_Apprentice
Ok. but 28nm is nowhere close to where ARM is (7nm) and will be over the next
few years (3nm). Smaller, faster, with multiple cores & on-board ML/Neural
subsystems. The cost on the ARM side is always going to be lower due to the
volume at which they are being dropped into phones. And if one wanted a faster
x64 path, then why not AMD Rizen?

~~~
pgeorgi
ARM isn't at 7nm, TSMC is. That's different from the PPC -> Intel transition
at Apple 15 years ago: the tech is available to anybody who's willing to pay
(while back then, Intel was 1-2 generations ahead of everybody else, and there
was no indication that this would change).

The primary goal of a project like this is to prove the concept, and if 28nm
NXP PPC chips are the sweet spot (enough performance for it to matter, unlike
all those RISC-V micros; efficient enough to fit in a laptop without it
working double-duty as a grill, unlike Power9 CPUs; cheap enough so that
people are willing to risk it, unlike the otherwise fabulous TALOS workstation
family) for that, that's not too bad.

In case this takes off, there can still be some entrepreneur who cooperates
with IBM or NXP or whoever has an efficient Power implementation lying around
and shrink it to the smallest process node they can afford, reusing this open
hardware design, and send it off to TSMC. That option didn't really exist back
in 2004.

------
frabert
I have to say, I'm really happy that this seems a sort of resurgence of a
proper CPU architecture diversity. I'm getting bored of the x86/ARM dichotomy.

~~~
tenebrisalietum
Having few instruction set architectures, or even one, enables quicker and
more efficient software development by lowering barrier to entry (easier to
learn and study just one ISA instead of many) and lowering the amount of
maintenance and development work that has to be done on development
infrastructure such as compilers.

This is assuming royalties don't have to be paid to an ISA creator, which is a
separate issue.

A single ISA doesn't have to mean there is a single CPU vendor or CPU
manufacturer.

~~~
mnw21cam
In my opinion, having a single ISA breeds lazyness, and causes shortcuts to be
made in programming. Like when the whole world got rid of all those esoteric
18-bit-word and worse architectures, and started writing loads of C for 32-bit
i386. Then 64-bit came along and loads of software wouldn't compile properly
without fixing things like assumptions of integer size, etc.

It's why I am very glad that while Linux is very popular, there is still a BSD
keeping programmers from going too crazy on the Linux-only features.

We don't know what future architecture will exist. I would rather we have a
multitude of architectures now, so that people write standards-conforming code
rather than it-works-on-amd64/Linux code.

~~~
gumby
The 18- ad 36-bit architectures weren't esoteric at the time! Though may of
them also had bad (outdated, and not-obviously bad at the time) ideas like
one's complement arithmetic. Machines like the PDP-10 were a pleasure to
program in assembly, but I haven't written a line of assembly code in over a
decade.

But I agree the world is full of "slap it together and if it runs once, ship
it" software -- that's what gave us Y2K. Time to re-read worse is better.

~~~
Aperocky
In retrospect, it's amazing how older games like Age of Empires work so well
and (almost) bug free from the get go. In the software development environment
for late 90s the amount of work to making sure that it works (without
crashing!) is amazing.

With extreme logging now our team still throws a bunch of internal errors
today, granted our team is much smaller but still, those older games are
amazing.

------
katmannthree
This is incredibly exciting.

Slimbook has made some excellent hardware in the past, with terrific software
support. They're much closer to being the Macbooks of the Linux world than
either Purism's or System76's offerings are.

~~~
Aperocky
The only problem is are PowerPC/Linux up to task? Correct if I'm wrong but
from what I know the entire linux ecosystem is geared toward X86/64 and if
you're on other architecture the selection of software that works shrinks
substantially.

While we could just compile everything, there's still the problem of untested
architecture integration, bugs that doesn't happen in X86 might happen in
PowerPC/ARM and it's not a trivial issue to debug a compiler/bimodal action
for instruction sets.

~~~
zeta0134
You would think this, but it's preeeetty amazing how much of the Linux world
works on an ARM-based Raspberry Pi. It's mostly a matter of finding the source
and doing a proper cross-compile, but it's kinda incredible how much work the
community has put into making the little board usable. The later models and
their substantial bump in available RAM have made desktop computing plausible:
I can run Blender to produce a 3D model, switch to Utilimaker Cura to slice
it, then run Pronsole and send the .gcode out to the printer, all on the same
device! It's not particularly _fast_ , but it's usable at least, and the
driver support an OpenGL in particular have come a long, long way.

If a $35 (okay, $55 for the ones with 4 GB RAM) computer running an older
down-clocked ARM can do this? I have little doubt that a POWER architecture
could theoretically do it just as well, if not better since it should
presumably be a much faster chip. I think it's mostly going to come down to
support from both the vendor and the community, but I wouldn't write it off
entirely.

~~~
brirec
> I have little doubt that a POWER architecture could theoretically do it just
> as well, if not better since it should presumably be a much faster chip. I
> think it's mostly going to come down to support from both the vendor and the
> community, but I wouldn't write it off entirely.

I actually think it'll come down to the validity of that first sentence I
quoted. A Pi 4 definitely has relatively decent specs for a small server or
low end laptop.

If this isn't a Power9 (aka the series that the G5 and the latest Power arch
chips are a part of) then all this has going for it is the openness of it. Is
it more open than a Pi 4? If they release a successor to the Compute Module 3+
with better specs and someone builds a laptop chassis around it, is there any
reason I shouldn't just buy that?

~~~
FrankBooth
The G5 (PowerPC 970) was based on POWER4.

~~~
kjs3
And a POWER9 is has quite a bit more horsepower than a Pi.

------
hsivonen
Looks like this is 64-bit but big endian. Weird choice when a) POWER has gone
little-endian and b) this a system whose form factor implies running a Web
browser and the Web requires little-endian ArrayBuffer behavior these days, so
not running on a natively little-endian CPU seems inefficient.

------
Endy
I will be very interested in this when they have a "give money, get laptop"
situation set up. I'm glad to see more open hardware and software in the wild.

But you'll have to excuse my skepticism as long as they need to run a
fundraiser to get even the basic product together, let alone getting said
product to market at a reasonable price for what it is.

~~~
baybal2
Even that is not the end line.

I knew a number of companies that had a Waterloo moments after very successful
kickstarter campaigns with PCs and smarthones.

Seeing a company making $1m+ on kickstarter, successfully delivering, and then
committing big to mass manufacturing only to see single digit orders per day
is something I see often in Shenzhen

~~~
Endy
Oh, certainly. But when it comes to advocating for free software (and free
hardware to run it on), the end line is nothing less than the end of
proprietary software. I'm not worried about reaching the end goal today, just
taking a stride. My feeling is that if they can get to a situation where for,
say, $200USD (or thereabouts), I can purchase their hardware with free
software loaded on it and be relatively confident that it will arrive in
working order, then I'm a happy camper. And I'll stand by that even if they
can't remain in business after that point; because I will have gotten the
machine I paid for.

Until I can exchange currency for goods, it's just vaporware with an ideal
attached.

------
Gregordinary
This is who they're working with: [https://www.powerpc-
notebook.org/2019/09/slimbook-to-provide...](https://www.powerpc-
notebook.org/2019/09/slimbook-to-provide-the-notebook-chassis/)

------
kop316
Is it just me, or is the fundraising campaign only for donations, and not to
get a physical product?

I would be far more interested to fund it if I knew I was getting a laptop,
but as far as I can tell, that's not the case.

~~~
katmannthree
Yes, the fundraising campaign is for engineering work for a PPC motherboard
for an existing laptop chassis.

I would also prefer sending them money in exchange for a physical product, but
they're not at that point yet. They're asking for €24,000 which honestly seems
a little low to cover the engineering work for an almost completely new laptop
MB.

~~~
kop316
The only thing with that is usually 1 PCB is 24,000, but then 10 PCBs are
25,000 (i.e. making more is a lot cheaper than the first). If they have an
existing chassis, than I would assume actually delivering a laptop isn't that
difficult (famous last words, I understand).

~~~
katmannthree
>If they have an existing chassis, than I would assume actually delivering a
laptop isn't that difficult (famous last words, I understand).

From what I can tell there are three distinct groups involved:

1) Slimbook -- an existing small laptop vendor. I'm not sure if they have an
active engineering role with their amd64 motherboards or if they're more of an
integrator, but I believe ~~they do the engineering for their laptop chassis
(unlike some other linux laptop "manufacturers" who sell rebranded Clevo
notebooks)~~. Edit: It appears that the Slimbook laptops are likely also
rebranded Clevo PCs. That's pretty disappointing.

2) ACube Systems -- an existing PowerPC board designer / vendor, whose
engineers will do the actual work under contract(?) from Power Progress
Community.

3) Power Progress Community -- PowerPC enthusiasts, the group soliciting
donations, and writing the specs. It seems they plan to function as an
integrator using Slimbook chassis and Acube Systems motherboards.

All that is to say that I don't think the engineers working on the PPC board
are the same ones who did the amd64 one.

------
tyingq
My recollection is that PowerPC, like ARM, can be either big or little endian.
But, that most OS implementations use little endian. Is that correct?

~~~
arcticbull
PowerPCs have configurable endianness in the MSR register, but boot into big
endian mode by default. macOS used it in big endian mode. Linux I can't speak
to but believe you can pick based on kernel build config. As for IBM's OS' or
the ones running on consoles, I can't speak to that.

The interesting part is that the motherboard also needs to support the
specific endianness chosen, and when running in little-endian mode, it needs
to perform a 64-bit byte swap on all data going in or out [1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC#Endian_modes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC#Endian_modes)

~~~
kzrdude
Why does it have a switch for that, and wouldn't it have a big overhead?

~~~
ajdlinux
IBM has traditionally been a big-endian shop - mainframes are BE, AIX and IBM
i on Power are BE. The Motorola 68K, which Apple was using before switching to
PowerPC, was also BE.

LE support was in the original PowerPC chips from the 90s, and was used to
support the Windows NT port that existed until NT4. Then switchable endianness
disappeared for a while, and finally came back in POWER8 when IBM decided it
wanted to expand the market for Power and that LE was helpful because it makes
porting easier and is more familiar to x86 programmers.

It doesn't, AFAIK, have any overhead - remember that byte swapping can be done
in combinational logic.

~~~
kzrdude
combinatorial logic... I guess byte order is just about which order you
connect the wires between two components, and then it's free modulo "wire"
length. That's my circuit board model of it, then.

------
unixhero
What kind of bios or system ROM will it use? OpenFirmware?

~~~
DonHopkins
Open Firmware is the only firmware standard in existence to have its own theme
song.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20070204145613/http://playground...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070204145613/http://playground.sun.com/pub/1275/misc/ofwsong.au)

[https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware](https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867724](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867724)

OpenFirmware uses architecture independent FORTH byte code, so peripheral
cards can include machine independent drivers and diagnostics!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware)

Open Firmware Forth Code may be compiled into FCode, a bytecode which is
independent of computer architecture details such as the instruction set and
memory hierarchy. A PCI card may include a program, compiled to FCode, which
runs on any Open Firmware system. In this way, it can provide platform-
independent boot-time diagnostics, configuration code, and device drivers.
FCode is also very compact, so that a disk driver may require only one or two
kilobytes. Therefore, many of the same I/O cards can be used on Sun systems
and Macintoshes that used Open Firmware. FCode implements ANS Forth and a
subset of the Open Firmware library.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844026](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844026)

That same Open Firmware Forth system [1], which was developed by Mitch Bradley
[2], was not only in the PowerPC Mac bios, but it was originally used for the
SparcStation boot roms, and eventually in the OLPC, and it was even an IEEE
Standard 1275-1994!

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Bradley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Bradley)

In fact: the Open Firmware boot loader and plug-in card firmware interface
technology, commonly used by both Sun and Apple, is the only firmware standard
in existence to have its own theme song [3] !!!

[3]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20070204145613/http://playground...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070204145613/http://playground.sun.com/pub/1275/misc/ofwsong.au)

    
    
        : OpenFirmwareSong ( - )
            \ By Mitch Bradley.
            \ Sung to the tune of "The Flintstones".
            𝄞
            ." Firmware" cr
            ." Open Firmware" cr
            ." It's the appropriate technology," cr
            ." Features" cr
            ." FCode booting" cr
            ." Hierarchical DevInfo tree." cr
            ." Hack Forth" cr
            ." Using Emacs on the keys," cr
            ." Save in" cr
            ." NVRAM if you please." cr
            𝄒 cr
            ." With your" cr
            ." Open Firmware" cr
            ." You can fix the bugs in no time" cr
            ." Bring the kernel up in no time" cr
            ." We'll have an FCode time!" cr
            𝄒 cr
            \ Thank you and good night!
            reboot
        ;

------
tengbretson
Can't wait to get OS X 10.5.8 running on it!

------
phs318u
Everyone here has made a bunch of great points about this hardware, and
massive props to the creators, and to IBM for open-sourcing the CPU. In light
of that, this comment might sound a bit "shallow Hal", but... looking at the
Slimbook's "Eclipse" case... nothing about that screams "slim".

------
locusofself
I'm not sure about power PC, but about 15 years ago I was working on a MIPS
based desktop linux system, and there was no way to get adobe flash to run on
it, which at the time was a big deal.

Could they have similar issues with media stuff (netflix, hulu etc) on a
device like this?

~~~
cmiles74
I think Google's Widevine (which is used for a lot of these DRM'd streams) is
only available for Chrome. I think we'd need Google to provide a Chrome for
PPC binary, which would require them to bundle a WideVine for PPC binary.

[https://www.widevine.com/](https://www.widevine.com/)

~~~
heavyset_go
Widevine support is enabled in Firefox on 32 and 64-bit x86 platforms.

binfmt_misc can enable Flash support.

~~~
cmiles74
I'm pretty sure they are using the binaries provided by Google. I don't think
they can compile for another platform, like PPC.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-
drm](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm)

~~~
heavyset_go
That's my point, Widevine is only available for certain platforms. You can
abuse binfmt_misc for other incompatible software, though.

------
tombert
Hmm, I wonder if this will be able to run AmigaOS natively.

I've played with Aros a bit but I would love an excuse to play with "real"
Amiga running natively, but the current PowerPC offerings for Amiga are
obscenely overpriced.

~~~
jug
That and MorphOS. There has been a huge gap there and these operating systems
running out of new hardware. Any new hardware.

------
jakeogh
Open?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21221602](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21221602)

------
geoffreyhale
I'd love it if someone would explain to me like I'm 5 years old. What is this?
What's the point of value here / why care?

~~~
lonelappde
Popular CPU instruction sets like your Intel/AMD 32 and 64bit machines are
proprietary. Power is not. This like GNU/Linux but for CPUs.

------
DonHopkins
Two questions come to mind:

1) Is it really a such great idea to give a product a name that is so rich in
potential for satire and parody?

2) Does it come in green?

------
DonHopkins
If only IBM had come out with a PowerPC Thinkpad that ran MacOS in 1995 like
IBM and Apple jointly promised was the whole point of CHRP: the Common
Hardware Reference Platform. But nooooo, they thought all the cool kids wanted
to run WARP, aka OS/2, aka "Half an Operating System".

The great thing about the Thinkpads of 24 years ago was that they were so well
built and modular and user serviceable that many of them would still be
working even now. They were so much more solid and dependable than anything
Apple ever produced in their entire history, and especially their shitty
PowerPC laptops of that time period. It would have been the perfect Powerbook,
but from IBM. But no, IBM and Apple couldn't stomach running Apple software,
and Apple couldn't stomach their software running on robust reliable
repairable hardware.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_Plat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_Platform)

>Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) is a standard system architecture
for PowerPC-based computer systems published jointly by IBM and Apple in 1995.
Like its predecessor PReP, it was conceptualized as a design to allow various
operating systems to run on an industry standard hardware platform, and
specified the use of Open Firmware and RTAS for machine abstraction purposes.
Unlike PReP, CHRP incorporated elements of the Power Macintosh architecture
and was intended to support the classic Mac OS and NetWare, in addition to the
four operating systems that had been ported to PReP at the time (Windows NT,
OS/2, Solaris, and AIX).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware)

>Open Firmware, or OpenBoot in Sun Microsystems parlance, is a standard
defining the interfaces of a computer firmware system, formerly endorsed by
the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It originated at
Sun, and has been used by Sun, Apple, IBM, ARM and most other non-x86 PCI
chipset vendors. Open Firmware allows the system to load platform-independent
drivers directly from the PCI card, improving compatibility.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2)

>The name stands for "Operating System/2", because it was introduced as part
of the same generation change release as IBM's "Personal System/2 (PS/2)" line
of second-generation personal computers.

IBM should have used this for the OS/2 theme song:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ_03vnjJkA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ_03vnjJkA)

My previous comments on CHRP:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438823](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438823)

>At the time, IBM was making CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) PowerPC
Thinkpads, which nobody could think of anything to do with because all they
did was run OS/2, when everybody actually wanted them to run MacOS (but IBM
refused to admit that was a good idea). That would have been the best of both
worlds, back when Apple and IBM were in bed together (i.e. Kaleida, Taligent).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18393341](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18393341)

>CHRP was the Common Hardware Reference Platform for the PowerPC, which IBM
and Apple collaborated on. IBM made a CHRP PowerPC Thinkpad that ran OS/2, but
out of pride refused to sell one that ran MacOS, which kind of missed the
whole point of CHRP. IBM just couldn't imagine why anyone would want to run
anything but OS/2 on them.

>I would have loved to have a MacOS powerbook running on wonderful Thinkpad
hardware, because Apple's laptop hardware was pretty crappy at the time. It
would have been the best of both worlds, but it was never to be.

------
coldnose
Oh how I miss big-endian...

------
pier25
Óle!

------
nouveau0
What year is this?

~~~
unixhero
Is this diversity not a positive thing in your mind, even in 2019?

~~~
nouveau0
That was clearly sarcasm. I never said anything about diversity

------
BrainInAJar
I had a powerpc laptop in 2005

