4 ms·

If you want to get away from that kind of thing, right now I think you're options are POWER8: https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php https://www

If you want to get away from that kind of thing, right now I think you're options are POWER8: https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php AMD has something similar to the Intel Management Engine: https://libreboot.org/faq/#amd https://libreboot.org/faq/#amd

dorfsmay 10y ago
Not SPARC?
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Specifically, the OpenSPARC T2: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/opensparc/opensparc-t2-page-1446157.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/opensparc/openspar... The ASIC implementation was nice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2 On a 65nm node... very outdated one... it might get 8 threads in 8 cores at 1.6GHz each with hardware RNG, crypto accelerators, and hypervisor support. That's the kind of implementation that would be useless for an open-source, secure workstation, server, or HPC node. ;) Especially if one slightly increased single-core performance or cache when porting it to 45nm. Forget that, though. Let's see what IBM will charge for their admittedly-faster pile of complicated silicon that only certain people can see which they've already turned into non-backdoored chips for you. ;)
  - apaprocki 10y ago
    Sadly the T1/T2 are ancient now. The non-open SPARC is up to T7, which is 20nm process, 256 threads on 32 cores.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      Sort of. I run the bloated Web, movies, IDE's, servers, and VM's on a Core Duo with 2 cores under 2GHz done on 65nm. I'd loose some single-threaded performance probably with an OpenSPARC T2 but otherwise it should handle my modern workload. Doesn't quite feel ancient. ;) The cool thing about open-source CPU's is one can always improve on them to, say, have an extra dozen cores on more recent nodes. Like Oracle does but probably less impressive with less money.
      - apaprocki 10y ago
        As a 2011 MBA user, I totally understand sticking with old tech that works. T1/T2 isn't really apples-to-apples, though. I came across this random quote from the libgmp devs that made me laugh: "SPARC chips before T4 under-perform on GMP. This is not because the GMP code is inadequately optimised for SPARC, but due to the basic v9 ISA as well as the micro-architecture of these chips. The T1 and T2 chips perform worse than any other SPARC chips; they compare to a 15 year older 486 chip." ouch!
        nickpsecurity 10y ago
        Ouch indeed. That's pretty bad. It's believable when I think back to the purpose of these chips: handling workloads that were more I/O and concurrency bound than CPU bound. So, probably identify and eliminate these problems early on even if developer has to drop some threads or cores. Note: There's always my other recommendation of turning open-source Leon3 into a multicore. Im curious what it or Leon4 get on such a benchmark versus Intels on similar process nodes.
      - pgeorgi 10y ago
        Some anecdata: Somebody tried to use a university department's T2 because it was unused and reasonably parallel for some experiment on hashing. Single core SHA1 speed on a t2 was ~300KB/s or so. Even with its 32 threads I recommended going for any ancient desktop that happened not to be used for a couple of days because the experiment would finish much faster there. Those desktops were about Core Duo class and managed 50-100MB/s SHA1 throughput (I think, it's been a couple of years).
        nickpsecurity 10y ago
        What the hell...??? Ok, it's looking like Im going to retract that recommendation for workstations. Maybe still servers thst are I/O bound.
na85 10y ago
If only I had ~8000 dollars to spend on a desktop I'd be waist-deep in porting Linux packages.
- lallysingh 10y ago
  AFAIK IBM's spent a good amount of engineering effort on making linux stuff run on power.
  - apaprocki 10y ago
    Yes, in practice the only things that really need "porting" to POWER are low-level compilers, languages, runtimes, tooling, etc. that may have arch-specific code. Sometimes IBM does this (e.g. Google v8 + Node.js), sometimes not... yet? (e.g. rust).
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
bwindels 10y ago
There is also this, which is also still pre-release, but looks like it might be a but more affordable. http://www.lowrisc.org http://www.lowrisc.org

dorfsmay 10y ago

Not SPARC?

nickpsecurity 10y ago
Specifically, the OpenSPARC T2: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/opensparc/opensparc-t2-page-1446157.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/opensparc/openspar... The ASIC implementation was nice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2 On a 65nm node... very outdated one... it might get 8 threads in 8 cores at 1.6GHz each with hardware RNG, crypto accelerators, and hypervisor support. That's the kind of implementation that would be useless for an open-source, secure workstation, server, or HPC node. ;) Especially if one slightly increased single-core performance or cache when porting it to 45nm. Forget that, though. Let's see what IBM will charge for their admittedly-faster pile of complicated silicon that only certain people can see which they've already turned into non-backdoored chips for you. ;)
- apaprocki 10y ago
  Sadly the T1/T2 are ancient now. The non-open SPARC is up to T7, which is 20nm process, 256 threads on 32 cores.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    Sort of. I run the bloated Web, movies, IDE's, servers, and VM's on a Core Duo with 2 cores under 2GHz done on 65nm. I'd loose some single-threaded performance probably with an OpenSPARC T2 but otherwise it should handle my modern workload. Doesn't quite feel ancient. ;) The cool thing about open-source CPU's is one can always improve on them to, say, have an extra dozen cores on more recent nodes. Like Oracle does but probably less impressive with less money.
    - apaprocki 10y ago
      As a 2011 MBA user, I totally understand sticking with old tech that works. T1/T2 isn't really apples-to-apples, though. I came across this random quote from the libgmp devs that made me laugh: "SPARC chips before T4 under-perform on GMP. This is not because the GMP code is inadequately optimised for SPARC, but due to the basic v9 ISA as well as the micro-architecture of these chips. The T1 and T2 chips perform worse than any other SPARC chips; they compare to a 15 year older 486 chip." ouch!
      - nickpsecurity 10y ago
        Ouch indeed. That's pretty bad. It's believable when I think back to the purpose of these chips: handling workloads that were more I/O and concurrency bound than CPU bound. So, probably identify and eliminate these problems early on even if developer has to drop some threads or cores. Note: There's always my other recommendation of turning open-source Leon3 into a multicore. Im curious what it or Leon4 get on such a benchmark versus Intels on similar process nodes.
    - pgeorgi 10y ago
      Some anecdata: Somebody tried to use a university department's T2 because it was unused and reasonably parallel for some experiment on hashing. Single core SHA1 speed on a t2 was ~300KB/s or so. Even with its 32 threads I recommended going for any ancient desktop that happened not to be used for a couple of days because the experiment would finish much faster there. Those desktops were about Core Duo class and managed 50-100MB/s SHA1 throughput (I think, it's been a couple of years).
      - nickpsecurity 10y ago
        What the hell...??? Ok, it's looking like Im going to retract that recommendation for workstations. Maybe still servers thst are I/O bound.

na85 10y ago

If only I had ~8000 dollars to spend on a desktop I'd be waist-deep in porting Linux packages.

lallysingh 10y ago
AFAIK IBM's spent a good amount of engineering effort on making linux stuff run on power.
- apaprocki 10y ago
  Yes, in practice the only things that really need "porting" to POWER are low-level compilers, languages, runtimes, tooling, etc. that may have arch-specific code. Sometimes IBM does this (e.g. Google v8 + Node.js), sometimes not... yet? (e.g. rust).
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

bwindels 10y ago

There is also this, which is also still pre-release, but looks like it might be a but more affordable. http://www.lowrisc.org http://www.lowrisc.org