
Google, IBM, Mellanox, Nvidia, Tyan form OpenPower Consortium - pdknsk
http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/41684.wss
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pdknsk
I have a question. Why did a moderator lowercase OpenPOWER? It makes a
difference.

~~~
speeder
To the mod:

POWER is not a typo, and it is not a emphasis, this is the trademark from IBM,
the thing is really named POWER in all caps.

~~~
marshray
IMHO, that doesn't mean it's not shouting. At some point, gratuitous
typography runs the risk of people refusing to respect it. For example, that
company that seems to expect people to spell its name with a trailing
exclamation point.

I have a bit more sympathy for IBM since they weren't exactly going for viral
adoption and (seriously) their products have a long tradition of being
lowercase-challenged.

~~~
iyulaev
"IMHO, that doesn't mean it's not shouting. "

So why did you write IBM, instead of Ibm? Or ARM, instead of Arm?

~~~
marshray
Because I find meaningless three letter acronyms much more palatable than five
letter contrived ones.

The contrivedness of an acronym increases exponentially with its length.

EDIT: OK, I give in. I had too much fun hanging out with the password cracking
guys at the awesome Passwords 13 conference last week.

------
dmm
IBM is furloughing US hardware employees this month:
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2013/08/05/report-
ibm...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2013/08/05/report-ibm-to-
furlough-most-of-its-u-s-hardware-staff-in-late-august/)

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ChuckMcM
I find this move greatly entertaining. Its like a Hollywood remake, "AIM
Alliance II"[1] Many of the things that make ARM successful IBM has dismissed
in the past as pandering to special interests. And, like Sun with its failed
attempt to make SPARC a thing, IBM has shown it can be a bit schizophrenic
when it comes to sharing enough that folks can compete. ARM, not having a fab,
and not having any products for sale, has very little to discourage it from
agreeing to things. IBM on the other hand has other interests that are often
in tension with the goal of making a processor architecture ubiquitous.

Glad they are trying again, not sure if they will be any more successful this
time, but will be pleasantly surprised if we get a credible third horse in the
'mass market instruction set architecture' race.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance)

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dlinder
Anyone else here remember the CHRP/PReP days? Good times.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_Platf...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_Platform)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PReP](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PReP)

~~~
jjindev
Yes, there is a Back To The Future aspect. That said, cpus are just cheaper
and easier these days. POWER, as a core, might break out.

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hga
Industry consortiums are always iffy things, but here's one thing I don't
think I've seen since Lisp Machine days that's potentially very interesting:

" _The consortium will offer open-source POWER firmware, the software that
controls basic chip functions._ "

~~~
wmf
Open source firmware is a thing; check out U-Boot and Coreboot. I hear Google
loves Coreboot.

~~~
hga
Of course, but those aren't CPU firmware. With MIT and LMI's Lisp Machines
(and probably the Symbolics LM-2 repackaging of MIT's, don't know about their
own architectures), depending on how much microcode SRAM you had you could add
your own microcoded instructions to the machine. There was even a compiler to
make it easier, although I don't know how widely that was used.

ADDED: the elReg article in this item,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6168144](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6168144),
based on talking to an IBM guy, implies it is that level of BIOS/chipset
firmware that's being talking about. Ah well.

~~~
wmf
It sounds like you're going to be disappointed. Firmware != microcode, and we
didn't say we're opening the microcode.

~~~
aray
We? Are you involved in the OpenPOWER project?

~~~
wmf
Not personally.

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marshray
"OpenPOWER is open to any firm that wants to innovate on the POWER platform
and participate in an open, collaborative effort."

Translation: There is no way that this hardware is going to end up being
affordable for small time builders, hackers, and enthusiasts. Unless someone
screws up and accidentally ships something like a Playstation 3 rev 1 using
it.

I'm only cynical because I'm jealous.

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ksec
Too little too late? I dont get it. Intel has been iterating x86 at insane
speed. In the high performance side Intel has finally caught on and eclipse
Power. While Intel x86 has been winning the performance and performance /
power in certain wattage scenario, they still dont have something to show for
in Low Power segment. Although the next gen Intel Atom should be on par with
the best in ARM, pricing would put Intel at disadvantage.

And that means in Low Power segment ARM realm supreme. Not likely to be
dethrone in the next coming decade. As they have solid roadmap and pretty much
the plan for next few years are all set and done.

So where does it left for Power? Coming from IBM they are very likely to be
expensive. IBM has never been known to iterate as fast as Intel. Let alone ARM
which now offers all sort of ARM chips for everything except High performance
in their portfolio.

I just dont see how this could change anything.

~~~
perryh2
For those that do not know, IBM processors are used in high-performance
computing applications. Some of the world's fastest supercomputers are based
on POWER [1]. These supercomputers can have hundreds of thousands or even
millions of cores for massively parallel computing. We've seen recently from
some of these systems that the POWER processors are much more effective than
x86 processors. They consume lower power and generate less heat. If combined
with Nvidia GPU's for CUDA and Mellanox's commodity InifiniBand interconnect
hardware, we could have affordable clusters for heterogenous high-performance
computing.

In the past, the supercomputers/clusters sold by IBM do not include hardware
from these other companies. I think this partnership with Tyan (major
manufacturer of current x86 chipsets) will also allow 3rd-party vendors to
build systems with IBM POWER processors.

In other words, POWER is not in the same market as x86 or ARM. It does have
its own niche in the market.

[1]
[http://www.top500.org/lists/2013/06/](http://www.top500.org/lists/2013/06/)

~~~
andor
_We 've seen recently from some of these systems that the POWER processors are
much more effective than x86 processors. They consume lower power and generate
less heat. _

_In other words, POWER is not in the same market as x86 or ARM. It does have
its own niche in the market._

Look at that Top500 list again and compare #1 (x86) and #3 (POWER). #1 has
about double the number of cores, performance and power usage. I'd say the
high-end Xeons are comparable to POWER in all aspects.

~~~
perryh2
The computer in the #1 spot was recently announced in China and sports Intel's
Xeon Phi coprocessors, which include many cores per unit. The system in the #3
spot uses all cpu's and is completely homogenous. I worked in HPC at LLNL last
year and saw the POWER processors. They are very small units and don't draw
nearly as much power as Intel Xeon series.

Here's a picture of the Sequoia machine:
[http://imgur.com/6UrZndM](http://imgur.com/6UrZndM)

Each of those cards is a single node in the cluster.

~~~
ksec
Great perspective. Any more to share on your view how will POWER changes, i
still dont see it goes anywhere apart from HPC. And being solely used in HPC
just isn't a variable long term strategy.

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speeder
If something cool comes out of this I will be very happy.

I always considered POWER much more cool than x86, and was pretty sad when
Apple abandoned it.

Also I was happy the current gen consoles used it, but I think Sony move to
make it bizarrely complex to the point that noone could code for it, kinda
stupid.

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angersock
What is the status of the old T1/T2 SPARC chips? Those were similarly open-
sourced, yes?

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tcas
The RTL source was released under the GPLv2, GPL and hardware is a bit iffy
since synthesis isn't the same as compilation, but depending on who owns the
IP (in this case Oracle) they could make the case you need to open source your
RTL source as well. I personally wouldn't invest the high hundreds of
thousands to millions of dollars needed to produce a chip without getting a
license agreement first with the ambiguity of the license, and which point I
would probably consider the POWER architectures (like many FPGAs vendors used
to) or ARM. In the case of pushing it to FPGAs, the OpenSPARC would use a ton
of resources to the point where I'd rather have a dedicated off chip
processor, or a FPGA with a built in processor.

I know people have put the OpenSPARC code on FPGAs, but I don't know of any
use in industry in FPGAs or ASICS. I'd be interested if anybody knows any.

~~~
angersock
It's a shame too... so many beautiful threads.

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rayiner
Relevant, for anybody thinking of jumping aboard that sinking ship:
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2013/08/05/report-
ibm...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2013/08/05/report-ibm-to-
furlough-most-of-its-u-s-hardware-staff-in-late-august).

------
1O0101ll100O
Hmmm. Google having significant influence on the lowest level of my
hardware...

~~~
lmm
You mean the bits that are already made in china?

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oscargrouch
any chance to have a parallella sort of SOC, a cheap HPC contender out of this
consortiums?

imagine a PowerPC HPC SOC for less than $99 :)

~~~
iyulaev
POWER != PowerPC, although they are related.

There are/were plenty of PowerPC-based microcontrollers. Freescale, among
other vendors, had a few families. It's all ARM now though as far as I know.

~~~
bashinator
PPC is still incredibly common in industrial embedded systems.

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fortmac
So should I not throwout my powerbook G4?

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AsymetricCom
Probably a good idea to deprecate your POWER infrastructure. This can only
mean bad things for the customer support. Getting your APIs twisted in this
so-called "open" software on proprietary, niche hardware mess with no single
POC will mean you're dependent on them for a long time to come and your
software will only become more and more complex and integrated as time goes
on, until nobody on earth can untangle it.

