2 ms·

IBM have done lots of work to port stuff to ppc64le (edit: wrong, see reply), which I think is the particular arch for P9. One of the reasons for introducing th

IBM have done lots of work to port stuff to ppc64le (edit: wrong, see reply), which I think is the particular arch for P9. One of the reasons for introducing the -le variant was to make porting easier. They ported Go; in my day job I've seen them porting various parts of Cloud Foundry and supporting infrastructure. Basically I'm interested to see if Google open these up on GCP. As points of differentiation go, it would be a doozy.

4ad 10y ago
> They ported Go; No, they didn't. Minux Ma, a major Go contributor unaffiliated with IBM, ported Go to POWER.
- jacques_chester 10y ago
  I'm sorry. Once again I am getting wires crossed in my head between POWER and 390.
- zdw 10y ago
  I would be nice if they would continue to maintain the big endian PowerPC branch of Go, as that appears to have atrophied in recent years. From a software quality standpoint, testing on older Apple PowerPC gear is probably the cheapest (PowerMac and Xserve G5's are in the $100-300 range on the used market) and highest performance big endian systems available, and they're still natively supported by a lot of mainline distros, Ubuntu in particular. The only other BE systems out there of comparable performance are SPARC systems which either are very expensive or have low-single threaded performance (T1 and T2 based).
  - 4ad 10y ago
    > I would be nice if they would continue to maintain the big endian PowerPC branch of Go Who is "they"? If you are referring to the Go project, big endian power is supported. > as that appears to have atrophied in recent years. What exactly has atrophied? > Apple PowerPC [...] highest performance big endian systems available ??? POWER8 (and soon POWER9) systems are available today, in big endian mode. You don't need obsolete hardware. Modern MIPS64 is also faster than old Apple G5s, albeit it can be tricky to get one. ARM64 is available in server grade hardware, with current level of performance. Unfortunately, even though ARM64 supports big-endian, nobody deploys in big-endian mode. When I did the ARM64 Go port, I did run my ARM64 hardware in big-endian mode for a while, but as that required created my own distribution, I never committed big-endian ARM64 support in the Go port. If a big-endian ARM64 distribution ever appears, we'll definitely add ARM64 big-endian support to Go. > The only other BE systems out there of comparable performance are SPARC systems FYI, I am working on a SPARC64 Go port. It's in a very advanced stage. I hope it will be ready for Go 1.8. I am using a S7-2 system, 4.13GHz, 128 threads, 256GB RAM, very good single threaded performance. I can assure you it's very performant, but yes, it's more expensive that POWER. In any case, thanks for your support! We definitely need more awareness of non-x86 architectures.

4ad 10y ago

> They ported Go; No, they didn't. Minux Ma, a major Go contributor unaffiliated with IBM, ported Go to POWER.

jacques_chester 10y ago
I'm sorry. Once again I am getting wires crossed in my head between POWER and 390.
zdw 10y ago
I would be nice if they would continue to maintain the big endian PowerPC branch of Go, as that appears to have atrophied in recent years. From a software quality standpoint, testing on older Apple PowerPC gear is probably the cheapest (PowerMac and Xserve G5's are in the $100-300 range on the used market) and highest performance big endian systems available, and they're still natively supported by a lot of mainline distros, Ubuntu in particular. The only other BE systems out there of comparable performance are SPARC systems which either are very expensive or have low-single threaded performance (T1 and T2 based).
- 4ad 10y ago
  > I would be nice if they would continue to maintain the big endian PowerPC branch of Go Who is "they"? If you are referring to the Go project, big endian power is supported. > as that appears to have atrophied in recent years. What exactly has atrophied? > Apple PowerPC [...] highest performance big endian systems available ??? POWER8 (and soon POWER9) systems are available today, in big endian mode. You don't need obsolete hardware. Modern MIPS64 is also faster than old Apple G5s, albeit it can be tricky to get one. ARM64 is available in server grade hardware, with current level of performance. Unfortunately, even though ARM64 supports big-endian, nobody deploys in big-endian mode. When I did the ARM64 Go port, I did run my ARM64 hardware in big-endian mode for a while, but as that required created my own distribution, I never committed big-endian ARM64 support in the Go port. If a big-endian ARM64 distribution ever appears, we'll definitely add ARM64 big-endian support to Go. > The only other BE systems out there of comparable performance are SPARC systems FYI, I am working on a SPARC64 Go port. It's in a very advanced stage. I hope it will be ready for Go 1.8. I am using a S7-2 system, 4.13GHz, 128 threads, 256GB RAM, very good single threaded performance. I can assure you it's very performant, but yes, it's more expensive that POWER. In any case, thanks for your support! We definitely need more awareness of non-x86 architectures.