6 ms·

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 Pow

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 7y ago
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.
- justinjlynn 7y ago
  Note that the first OMI controller from Microchip (nee Microsemi) will have fully open source firmware. This is huge coming from Microsemi/Microchip ... and likely a result of IBM strongarming them for it. Even with a complete shift in memory architecture, IBM have still managed to ensure that their ecosystem is fully open and auditable - beautiful. Also, take a look at the Protected Execution Facility (aka Ultravisor) ... it permits systems owners to separate hypervisor administration and code from guest machines and shrinks the trusted code base to almost nothing. Also, fully open source. Intel and AMD have something kind of similar but it requires proprietary firmware and trusted key signing by the vendor while IBM's design doesn't require any proprietary firmware or trusted key signing by the vendor at all. Very very cool.
  - wbl 7y ago
    Until your guests start talking to one another. Then you might have isolation but it's at the wrong level.
    - justinjlynn 7y ago
      If your guests start talking to one another, then it still has to be permitted by the ultravisor or the network layer. Isolation is subjective and PEF/Ultravisor permit you to separate the administrators of the hypervisor from the administrators of the guest workloads. This is something you don't really get elsewhere with the same security guarantees and/or open implementation.
- tyingq 7y ago
  "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.
  - nineteen999 7y ago
    They also had manufacturing problems at times. Can't remember with it was the Ultrasparc III or IV for this specific example, but when a whole bunch of CPU's were recalled because the ceramic would actually seperate from the rest of the chip once it warmed up.
  - ken 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      Linux killed off the RISC vendors only after AMD produced a 64 bit x86 (2003). Sun was doing quite well with Sparc prior.
ori_b 7y ago
If it's going to go anywhere, it needs to be maintained by IBM as they build a consortium of vendors and manufacturers. But that's true of any project: throw it over the wall and abandon it, it will die.
jtl999 7y ago
Right now you can buy the Talos II motherboard (or a complete prebuilt system) from Raptor Engineering, and along with it you can have a single or dual processor setup of up to 22 cores each with 4 way SMT (essentially hyperthreading). It's still early days but I hear it's competitive with x86_64 at certain things and runs Gentoo well. As a bonus most of the firmware of the components on the board are open source as well, and just a git clone away. (Not sponsored by them, but I've considered such a system for myself)
- favorited 7y ago
  Out of curiosity– why have you considered it? It seems like cool tech, but I have no practical use for it.
  - girvo 7y ago
    I got to use POWER8 and POWER9 when the company I was working for partnered with IBM. My main reason I liked them was: they’re very cool, heh. The other reason was I quite enjoyed the AltiVec instruction set was a great fit for the work I was doing, the integer vector instructions were awesome. Nothing you can’t do on X64, but was nicer in a few ways.
- shifto 7y ago
  It's not competitive at all at performance. Phoronix did a review a few days ago. Am on mobile now but will look for it and edit this post. * https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rome-power9-arm&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rome-pow...
  - rubin55 7y ago
    From the article: “The Talos II server with dual IBM POWER9 22-core processors ended up delivering performance around that of the EPYC 7551 previous-generation Naples processor. But overall the Talos II POWER9 had quite a respectable showing compared to the x86_64 CPUs.” Not exactly int the “not at all” range imho.
tedunangst 7y ago
The T1 also had a very particular niche which never really materialized.
- wbl 7y ago
  I was and am surprised. Seemed great for multithreaded server workloads.
fnord77 7y ago
wonder if Sparc x86 was opened sourced right from the start if it would have ended up the dominate *nix instead of Linux.

kev009 7y ago

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.

justinjlynn 7y ago
Note that the first OMI controller from Microchip (nee Microsemi) will have fully open source firmware. This is huge coming from Microsemi/Microchip ... and likely a result of IBM strongarming them for it. Even with a complete shift in memory architecture, IBM have still managed to ensure that their ecosystem is fully open and auditable - beautiful. Also, take a look at the Protected Execution Facility (aka Ultravisor) ... it permits systems owners to separate hypervisor administration and code from guest machines and shrinks the trusted code base to almost nothing. Also, fully open source. Intel and AMD have something kind of similar but it requires proprietary firmware and trusted key signing by the vendor while IBM's design doesn't require any proprietary firmware or trusted key signing by the vendor at all. Very very cool.
- wbl 7y ago
  Until your guests start talking to one another. Then you might have isolation but it's at the wrong level.
  - justinjlynn 7y ago
    If your guests start talking to one another, then it still has to be permitted by the ultravisor or the network layer. Isolation is subjective and PEF/Ultravisor permit you to separate the administrators of the hypervisor from the administrators of the guest workloads. This is something you don't really get elsewhere with the same security guarantees and/or open implementation.
tyingq 7y ago
"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.
- nineteen999 7y ago
  They also had manufacturing problems at times. Can't remember with it was the Ultrasparc III or IV for this specific example, but when a whole bunch of CPU's were recalled because the ceramic would actually seperate from the rest of the chip once it warmed up.
- ken 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    Linux killed off the RISC vendors only after AMD produced a 64 bit x86 (2003). Sun was doing quite well with Sparc prior.

ori_b 7y ago

If it's going to go anywhere, it needs to be maintained by IBM as they build a consortium of vendors and manufacturers. But that's true of any project: throw it over the wall and abandon it, it will die.

jtl999 7y ago

Right now you can buy the Talos II motherboard (or a complete prebuilt system) from Raptor Engineering, and along with it you can have a single or dual processor setup of up to 22 cores each with 4 way SMT (essentially hyperthreading). It's still early days but I hear it's competitive with x86_64 at certain things and runs Gentoo well. As a bonus most of the firmware of the components on the board are open source as well, and just a git clone away. (Not sponsored by them, but I've considered such a system for myself)

favorited 7y ago
Out of curiosity– why have you considered it? It seems like cool tech, but I have no practical use for it.
- girvo 7y ago
  I got to use POWER8 and POWER9 when the company I was working for partnered with IBM. My main reason I liked them was: they’re very cool, heh. The other reason was I quite enjoyed the AltiVec instruction set was a great fit for the work I was doing, the integer vector instructions were awesome. Nothing you can’t do on X64, but was nicer in a few ways.
shifto 7y ago
It's not competitive at all at performance. Phoronix did a review a few days ago. Am on mobile now but will look for it and edit this post. * https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rome-power9-arm&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rome-pow...
- rubin55 7y ago
  From the article: “The Talos II server with dual IBM POWER9 22-core processors ended up delivering performance around that of the EPYC 7551 previous-generation Naples processor. But overall the Talos II POWER9 had quite a respectable showing compared to the x86_64 CPUs.” Not exactly int the “not at all” range imho.

tedunangst 7y ago

The T1 also had a very particular niche which never really materialized.

wbl 7y ago
I was and am surprised. Seemed great for multithreaded server workloads.

fnord77 7y ago

wonder if Sparc x86 was opened sourced right from the start if it would have ended up the dominate *nix instead of Linux.