
IBM has released the Power Architecture instruction set to the Linux Foundation - larra
https://www.eejournal.com/article/ibm-gives-away-powerpc-goes-open-source/
======
mshook
Previous discussion is here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20748711](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20748711)

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justinjlynn
> On the other hand, this seems like a sad and humiliating end to a once-proud
> processor family. It’s as if the Rothschilds or Rockefellers went begging on
> the street. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Wow. Why is it that when someone is confident in something and chooses to
donate it to the people in the face of a changing market people treat them as
if they've failed? This is a massive success and a new beginning - they've
taken a closed system they've been working on for decades and opened it up -
we should be applauding this action, not denigrating the effort.

~~~
tw04
Because it was literally failing in the market. IBM PAID global foundries $1.5
BILLION to take the chip business from them. Now they're giving away the IP in
hopes that someone will actually start making chips from it to drive demand
for Redhat. If you think Power was a massive success you must be waiting on
the edge of your seat for Itanium to finally reach global dominance too.

[https://www.bizjournals.com/albany/morning_call/2015/01/anal...](https://www.bizjournals.com/albany/morning_call/2015/01/analysts-
expect-approval-of-globalfoundries-deal.html)

~~~
kev009
And they got the highest performance 14nm FinFET process on the market for P9
and z14 while clearing the way to compete against fabless AMD and ARM vendors
with P10. If anything, intel looks stupid here after falling behind in fab
tech and causing immense turmoil for their external fab customers.

A trivial review of IBM's systems revenue versus the datacenter breakout of
any other CPU maker earnings reports will net you: yes, it is indeed quite
successful.

~~~
Spooky23
No way. 3x performance for 5x the cost doesn’t add up. IBM juices the data
center systems metrics with their cross-selling strategy. You need to look at
the deals, they give away stuff like storage or even software.

IBM was brilliant in how it rolled up the mainframe/old school Unix/AS400
business on the hardware side. But that playbook was based on big traditional
companies and leveraging the base and relationships... there’s a reason that
AIX essentially is the last proprietary Unix. But every EA renewal cycle
Microsoft is shipping some Azure, some department is buying a SaaS platform,
old school IT directors are retiring, etc. It’s a slowly dying business and
has been for a long time.

Intel has its own problems, but they are a different category of problem. Even
then, we have multiple suppliers, and Intels struggles ultimately help the x64
platform.

~~~
close04
> No way. 3x performance for 5x the cost doesn’t add up.

Performance and price never had a linear relationship. Past a certain point
each "unit" of performance costs substantially more than the previous. Think
80-20 rule.

~~~
Spooky23
This is true, but with modern applications, it tends to be more economical to
scale out vs up.

If you're running a big implementation of software that scales up or has
licensing rules that make scale-out expensive (ie. Oracle), Power is a no-
brainer. Problem is that generally speaking, the industry had gone a different
path.

~~~
close04
As always this is a "right tool for the job" discussion. There's no silver
bullet. But the fact that price rises faster than performance the closer you
are to peak performance doesn't say anything about the value of the product.
The problem is usually when you can no longer scale out. You'll see the same
with storage, GPU, RAM, etc.

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pippy
Seems like a move to prevent RISC-V from gaining a foothold in the server
market. Recently there's a potential for server market upset; with trade wars,
Intel struggling with die shrinks, ML and custom silicon demands (see FPGA),
and recent x86 security flaws. Large players will be looking at optimizing how
their infrastructure is set up.

It's a good move on behalf of IBM. But it might be a bit too late. If you were
a company with a demand for custom silicon, you'd probably choose RISC-V as
they already have experienced companies willing to provide support and
services to meet your needs. With POWER your choices will be limited.

~~~
justinjlynn
> Seems like a move to prevent RISC-V from gaining a foothold in the server
> market.

On it's face, yes - absolutely. IBM had to do it _now_ if it didn't want its
lunch entirely eaten out from under it. That said, that's a good thing. I
think we'll see both architectures working from opposite sides and moving into
each other's markets. It's still very early days for RISC-V and OpenPOWER, so
hopefully they'll be able to benefit each other. We've got excellent open
friendly hardware for OpenPOWER (Raptor Computing System's Talos/Blackbird and
soon, Condor lines) and we're getting there with RISC-V embedded systems and
mobiles.

At least now on both the high and low end of the performance spectrum we have
open alternatives for all needs. Here's to a more open, more diverse future
where none of us has to scramble to be everywhere, all the time, all at once.

------
satya71
Sun released OpenSparc as open source (including the design) in 2006. It was
obsolete already and was hard to work with. I don't think it got anywhere.

The PowerPC is perhaps better placed, may not get much farther.

~~~
kev009
Consider:

1) SPARC was _never_ commercially competitive versus contemporaries. Not an
ISA problem but they never had the design acumen other CPU makers did/do and
the manufacturing partners always treated it second rate. I could stop here,
there is simply no comparison or lesson in SPARC other than how not to run a
business. It was successful in spite of this due to many other reasons
(primarily ecosystem).

2) POWER9 is still competitive against chips just now launching 3 years later
on a full step of manufacturing processes.

3) Other CPU vendors are about to hit an enormous memory wall. IBM is 4 years
ahead of the industry here with OMI. Can still use cheap standard DDR4 by
putting the buffers on board or on chiplets in P10. OMI submitted to JEDEC for
standardization so it may be a total non-issue.

4) IBM's AXON PHY is 4 years ahead of everyone else in design and actually
deployed. Glueless AI/ML/DSP nodes with GPUs or FPGAs versus i.e. nvidia DGX.
Much better interconnect than infinityfabric.

5) P10, P11, and P12 are already planned. Expect future supercomputing wins
especially with P11 (US gov likes to spread contracts among vendors every
other generation). The enterprise POWER business is big enough to subsidize
this game for a while.

If there is an error or impasse, it is that most developers now consume VMs on
cloud services and for cloud operators the decision to move off x86 is a
bureaucratic nightmare in the few companies that are technical enough to do
it. POWER will live for a long time under IBM. The most likely outcome of this
announcement is PowerISA MCUs and SoCs may see a resurgence. I can't see any
trends clearly enough to predict POWER uptake outside that.

~~~
tyingq
_" SPARC was _never_ commercially competitive versus contemporaries"_

They were far and away the market share leader for Unix server shipments in
the late 90's and early 2000's.

~~~
ken
Their complete systems were competitive in terms of having a good (price,
features, usability, reliability, support, ...) tuple, but that doesn't mean
_every_ attribute of their systems was the best of all systems on the market.
I know people who bought Solaris systems, and nobody bought it because of the
CPU.

You say they were the market share leader through the "early 2000's". In 2005,
their OS was open-sourced. Sure enough, everyone I knew using Solaris since
then has run it on x86. People like the OS but only used SPARC when they had
no choice.

~~~
tyingq
Linux killed off the RISC vendors only after AMD produced a 64 bit x86 (2003).

Sun was doing quite well with Sparc prior.

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cybervegan
The author seems to not know the difference between the chip and the ISA -
Instruction Set Architecture. How this is implemented in silicon (or other
substrate) does not seem to have been released, so you'd have to create your
own cores, cache, memory interface and all that jazz. It _does_ mean that
RISC-V chips could be used as a starting point, because they already implement
all that, but with a different ISA. However, it's probably non-trivial to
implement a different ISA on an existing chip design. AMD did it with their
early Athlon chips, by using a translation layer, but that's not the most
efficient way to do it...

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pacetherace
They just open-sourced the instruction set. That is a big thing but if I am
understanding it correctly, this is pretty much relinquishing the copyright to
the instruction set. They are not open-sourcing any CPU.

~~~
justinjlynn
So, partially correct. The ISA, along with the new memory bus (OMI) and some
other infrastructural specs - are being licensed under an open source license
with patent grants; it's still very much copyrighted, in the same way the
Linux kernel is Open Source but still copyrighted. The microarchitectural
implementations of that ISA specification - POWER9, etc - are still
proprietary, even if extremely well publicly documented. IBM still expects to
make a lot of money with the highest performing open source ISA implementation
on the market.

~~~
sliken
So you can't fab your own power9, but you can spend the R&D to make a new chip
and have it be compatible with the Power port of linux, gcc, etc.

Right?

~~~
kev009
Yes. It's best to contrast this versus say ARM where everyone has to pay for
the ISA and potentially they also license an implementation or partial
reusable designs. Sparc, Risc-V, MIPS and PowerISA are royalty free ISAs with
open source implementations.

The ISA and implementation of POWER has been license-able from the beginning.
You can still license implementations, depending on what you are doing that
may be pretty cost effective.

~~~
cipherboy
Hiding in the details of your comment and partially in reply to the parent...

You can't fab the same POWER9 that ships from IBM, but like you implied,
someone could (eventually) fab a POWER9 CPU built on an open-source core.

The microwatt project [0] was demoed at the OpenPOWER Summit and is an open-
source softcore. I'm very interested in watching to see what happens with this
project and how much of the ISA they end up implementing. They've run a subset
of micropython [1] on it and apparently gotten a few FPGAs working. The Summit
talk [2] mentioned DRAM support and Linux support potentially being on the
roadmap.

[0]:
[https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt](https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt)

[1]:
[https://github.com/mikey/micropython/commits/powerpc](https://github.com/mikey/micropython/commits/powerpc)

[2]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvMiSNWEmYM&t=1h13m20s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvMiSNWEmYM&t=1h13m20s)

~~~
hlandau
As far as I'm aware, the entire POWER9 design is available for licencing for
$$$.

The only obstacle to fabbing it yourself would be that it's designed to be
fabbed on GF's 14HP process, which incorporates some IBM-proprietary fab
technology which was transferred from IBM when they spun off their own fab to
GF; thus AFAIK the GF 14HP process is only licenced for IBM's use. Since IBM
is willing to licence POWER9, perhaps they'd also be willing to negotiate
access to the process.

(GF 14HP is different to GF 14LPP, which is what other GF 14nm customers (e.g.
AMD Zen) use.)

------
monocasa
> Goes Open Source

But without actually opening any source...

~~~
justinjlynn
[https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt](https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt)

Written initially by a Distinguished Engineer at IBM and sponsored by IBM,
this was released when the announcement was made at the OpenPOWER Summit.

------
squarefoot
Let me address one aspect that nobody seems to have thought of: in the last
years we have been diving right into the era of processors containing smaller
processors, and closed blobs instructing them to do things neither users nor
developers have any knowledge or control, that is, pervasive potential
surveillance built by design in every piece of hardware bigger than a toaster.

If IBM donating the Power instruction set and patents means that just one CPU
will come out of it, although 50% more slow and costly than the competition
but free from shady subsystems, ie a trustworthy CPU, I would call that a huge
victory.

Closed chipsets device drivers are another similar problem, still that would
be a good start nonetheless.

------
RickJWagner
Here's hoping this is the start of some Red Hat showing up in Big Blue!

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rbanffy
What worries me is that SPARC was already opened and that failed to create a
market for SPARC devices. It could be that now the open source market is
mature enough to drive many competing implementations of POWER to fill niches
IBM can't.

------
cjhanks
And then China picks up the design and so.. profit?

~~~
wmf
IBM already sold Power8 to Suzhou PowerCore which then went out of business
(if it was ever a real business). When it comes to processors China seems to
be throwing everything at the wall (MIPS, Power, ARM, etc.) and almost nothing
is sticking.

~~~
wyxuan
Their collab with AMD is working out okay though right? And still gets a chunk
of money from licensing server chip designs that they (China) then use for
super computers

~~~
jabl
Don't know about AMD collaboration, but their home-grown supercomputers use
some home-grown ISA, reportedly roughly based on an extended variant of MIPS.

As an aside, it was long before Trumps trade war with China that USA refused
to sell chips for Chinese supercomputers, prompting them to seriously start
developing their own.

Will be interesting whether we'll see Chinese POWER designs, or whether they
continue with MIPS and RISC-V.

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fernly
What actually can one do now that one couldn't before? For "one" read either,
"a technology company" or, "an advanced amateur".

~~~
sliken
My reading is that you can now make a simple CPU compatible with the power ISA
which gets you compatibility with power ports like gcc and the linux kernel.

But to be competitive with Epyc, Xeon, and the Power 9 you'd have to spend a
pretty huge amount of R&D. It does sound like there's some IP related to the
memory controller which is available, but there's much required for a high end
CPU that is not available.

~~~
justinjlynn
We've a proven ISA with performant implementations, of both silicon and
compilers, now, and now we as a community can invest in that R&D together
under open terms. It's a big step forward.

------
Zenst
IBM over the past couple of decades have been gradually shifting away from
hardware and more into a service provider. Yes they still do their mainframe
style behemoths and their AS/400's (not sure what branding they have upon
those now ?-series last I touched that field) and with those have consolidates
much upon the power CPU (least the AS/400 stuff).

What I do wonder is - what will they do with AIX? As I do foresee it going the
way of Solaris, and the parallels to their CPU architecture do seem somewhat
uncanny.

Personally I have a little mixed feelings about this having used IBM's first
ever attempt at a RISC CPU in the RT6150 and got one of the first (before
public release) hands on the power 1 cpu used in an RS/6000.

I also do find it interesting how an instruction set is so coveted in a day
and time that compilers are so mature that to create your own ISA and adapt a
compiler to accommodate it is not out of the grasp of an individual and much
more easier a task than days prior. But then the real hard work is designing a
CPU to run that instruction set, that becomes very much more than a one-person
job. Though who knows - maybe in 10-20 years from now, the ability to design
some silicon becomes as accessible as programming in SCRATCH (drag and drop
style design/programming).

But back to the Power Architecture, what is IBM's real plans here - charity/PR
or a way to shift processor design into a realm of outsourcing that enables
them to focus upon their more profitable streams and focus - like services?
Maybe.

Though I do feel they may of missed the boat upon this, what with Apple at one
stage a big Power cpu user and now looking to shift towards ARM, of which they
design their own CPU's. Could Apple embrace this opertunity or would the
transition be a cross to hard for them to bear? That is for me one of the
signs on how this will traction. If Apple shows interest, then this could be
epicly big. Not saying that if they don't that it will fail. But do feel that
had they did this 5-10 years ago, things would of been more likely to traction
and grow. Today, beyond some niche area's, I'm not so sure it will be as epic
as it could of been and may just be a case of too little too late. Equally I'm
mindful that whilst IMHO it is too late to have as big an impact as it could
of been, it may prove damaging towards RISC V CPU progression and by splitting
the options open - may well damage both and only aid the existing Intel and
Arm options out there.

------
WillYouFinish
According to benchmarks Power fell quite behind it's competitors. I wonder if
this will change anything in the future.

[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rome-
pow...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rome-
power9-arm&num=1)

~~~
ummonk
_> Power efficiency / performance-per-Watt tests were not conducted due to the
remote ARM testing. Likewise, there isn't performance-per-dollar metrics due
to many variables at play when it comes to factoring in the ARM and POWER9
costs._

That seems to make the benchmarks entirely useless for gauging Power
performance for the server market. Not saying it didn’t fall behind its
competitors (I’d be surprised if it didn’t given how much more AMD and ARM
makers have been investing in chip development), but these benchmarks don’t
tell us that.

------
michael_a_green
If anyone is interested in developing Power Architecture based CPU IP, let me
know.
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/magreen](https://www.linkedin.com/in/magreen)

------
joshbaptiste
Question for the hardware enthusiasts.. if the PowerPC is now opensourced, how
do programs such as QEMU emulate a closed ISA? reverse engineering?

~~~
wmf
The PowerPC ISA was mostly documented and the patents generally only apply to
hardware implementations, not software emulation. And realistically IBM never
saw QEMU as a threat so they didn't destroy it (let's not mention Hercules
though).

~~~
joshbaptiste
ah gotcha, thanks

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arthurcolle
PowerPC has been dead for almost a decade, no? The moment Apple switched over
to Intel and deprecated PowerPC, PPC became irrelevant. Beyond the target
parties that care about software archaeology, what is the importance of this
action?

It may have academic value, but practically speaking, how does this matter?

Just asking the crowd in case there is a perspective I am missing.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
> The moment Apple switched over to Intel , PPC became irrelevant

In a good year, Apple sold about 3 million PowerPC Macs. Sony and Microsoft
sold about 80 million PS3s and Xbox 360s each. I think one could make the case
that those Macs were of questionable relevance to begin with... (yes I know
they used G5 Macs for dev machines)

~~~
seabrookmx
Also the last three Nintendo consoles before the Switch.. one of which (the
original Wii) sold over 100m.

------
auvi
where can I see the Verilog/VHDL code for this? anybody knows the link?

~~~
rusticpenn
[https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt](https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt)
( from another comment)

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braindead_in
Is Power PC a RISC cpu?

~~~
mmrezaie
The name "POWER" was originally presented as an acronym for "Performance
Optimization With Enhanced RISC" [1]. So yes.

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

------
PedroBatista
IBM gives away PowerPC the same way a foreclosure grocery shop gives away a
bag of onions.

