12 ms·

Slimbook collaborates with the PowerPC laptop

171 points by jrepinc 7y ago

frabert 7y ago
I have to say, I'm really happy that this seems a sort of resurgence of a proper CPU architecture diversity. I'm getting bored of the x86/ARM dichotomy.
- tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  Having few instruction set architectures, or even one, enables quicker and more efficient software development by lowering barrier to entry (easier to learn and study just one ISA instead of many) and lowering the amount of maintenance and development work that has to be done on development infrastructure such as compilers. This is assuming royalties don't have to be paid to an ISA creator, which is a separate issue. A single ISA doesn't have to mean there is a single CPU vendor or CPU manufacturer.
  - panpanna 7y ago
    OpenBSD folks think supporting more architectures have helped them creating a better OS.
    - kjs3 7y ago
      Yup...Theo specifically talks about alignment restrictions on SPARC as catching all sorts of weird corner-case bugs.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    My usual take is that it gives us better efficiency in the short-term, at the expense of making it far more likely that we get stuck in a rut long-term.
    - dmix 7y ago
      Kinda like Japan's economy. Lots of old companies trying to keep up and very little outside entrepreneurship to disrupt and progress the industries.
  - gnode 7y ago
    I agree that there's a programmer cost to having a multiplicity of ISAs. However, ISAs still have some relation to the design of the microarchitecture, which for x86 processors is not open. The RISC-V ISA for instance was created mainly because it helped the effort to create open CPU hardware.
  - mnw21cam 7y ago
    In my opinion, having a single ISA breeds lazyness, and causes shortcuts to be made in programming. Like when the whole world got rid of all those esoteric 18-bit-word and worse architectures, and started writing loads of C for 32-bit i386. Then 64-bit came along and loads of software wouldn't compile properly without fixing things like assumptions of integer size, etc. It's why I am very glad that while Linux is very popular, there is still a BSD keeping programmers from going too crazy on the Linux-only features. We don't know what future architecture will exist. I would rather we have a multitude of architectures now, so that people write standards-conforming code rather than it-works-on-amd64/Linux code.
    - frozenport 7y ago
      Actually before x86 dominance, pre 90s many developers would write in ASM or convert C/pascal to ASM. This kind of code wasn't very portable.
    - gumby 7y ago
      The 18- ad 36-bit architectures weren't esoteric at the time! Though may of them also had bad (outdated, and not-obviously bad at the time) ideas like one's complement arithmetic. Machines like the PDP-10 were a pleasure to program in assembly, but I haven't written a line of assembly code in over a decade. But I agree the world is full of "slap it together and if it runs once, ship it" software -- that's what gave us Y2K. Time to re-read worse is better.
      - Aperocky 7y ago
        In retrospect, it's amazing how older games like Age of Empires work so well and (almost) bug free from the get go. In the software development environment for late 90s the amount of work to making sure that it works (without crashing!) is amazing. With extreme logging now our team still throws a bunch of internal errors today, granted our team is much smaller but still, those older games are amazing.
      - DonHopkins 7y ago
        "If you're not working with 36 bits, you're not working with a full DEC!" -DIGEX (Doug Humphrey) trolling the 32-bit VAX weenies at DECUS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514918
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - madez 7y ago
    I think it is appropriate to specify your statement with a significant detail; a ISA monoculture enables quicker and more efficient development of proprietary software. Free and open software deals efficiently and fast with different ISA's, as can be seen in the ports of Debian and the targets of GCC.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      Free software is great, but it's not efficiently developed. That's why it's been so hard for people to get a satisfactory Linux on the desktop GUI and it's still a crapshoot to even get all of a laptop working .
  - pgeorgi 7y ago
    > Having few instruction set architectures, or even one, enables quicker and more efficient software development by lowering barrier to entry > A single ISA doesn't have to mean there is a single CPU vendor or CPU manufacturer. Then let's standardize on a single open and royalty-free one. That excludes x86 and ARM.
- ken 7y ago
  I'll celebrate implementation diversity, but I'm not sure why I'd celebrate interface diversity. All it does is create pointless incompatibilities that users have to deal with. I think it's great that many companies have their own implementation of open standards like Unicode, TCP/IP, and SMTP. Life was worse in every way when every company had their own special encodings for text files, and their own proprietary network protocols. I can type some text in Japanese and email it to a friend, in 2019, and it will just work. Excellent! The continued survival of x86 and other proprietary instruction sets reeks to me of the days of the "Best Viewed with ${browser}" badges. It's purely a pain point for users, for what appears to be merely a battle of egos among the world's richest megacorporations. Praising the growth of a third CPU opcode system sounds to me like wanting to bring back, say, the Scottish historical units of measurement, on the basis that we're "getting bored" with the SI/USCS duopoly. Bored is good! Bored means it works. I wish the USCS would die off, too, so I could be even more bored in that department.
- kjs3 7y ago
  SPARC has been open for a long time and there are numerous implementations. MIPS (and Longsoon) has been shipping forever. RISC-V is real. There's a project to create a re-implementation of SuperH. It's not like x86 & ARM is the only thing in the world...it's just the only thing that matters economically right now.
katmannthree 7y ago
This is incredibly exciting. Slimbook has made some excellent hardware in the past, with terrific software support. They're much closer to being the Macbooks of the Linux world than either Purism's or System76's offerings are.
- Aperocky 7y ago
  The only problem is are PowerPC/Linux up to task? Correct if I'm wrong but from what I know the entire linux ecosystem is geared toward X86/64 and if you're on other architecture the selection of software that works shrinks substantially. While we could just compile everything, there's still the problem of untested architecture integration, bugs that doesn't happen in X86 might happen in PowerPC/ARM and it's not a trivial issue to debug a compiler/bimodal action for instruction sets.
  - zeta0134 7y ago
    You would think this, but it's preeeetty amazing how much of the Linux world works on an ARM-based Raspberry Pi. It's mostly a matter of finding the source and doing a proper cross-compile, but it's kinda incredible how much work the community has put into making the little board usable. The later models and their substantial bump in available RAM have made desktop computing plausible: I can run Blender to produce a 3D model, switch to Utilimaker Cura to slice it, then run Pronsole and send the .gcode out to the printer, all on the same device! It's not particularly fast, but it's usable at least, and the driver support an OpenGL in particular have come a long, long way. If a $35 (okay, $55 for the ones with 4 GB RAM) computer running an older down-clocked ARM can do this? I have little doubt that a POWER architecture could theoretically do it just as well, if not better since it should presumably be a much faster chip. I think it's mostly going to come down to support from both the vendor and the community, but I wouldn't write it off entirely.
    - brirec 7y ago
      > I have little doubt that a POWER architecture could theoretically do it just as well, if not better since it should presumably be a much faster chip. I think it's mostly going to come down to support from both the vendor and the community, but I wouldn't write it off entirely. I actually think it'll come down to the validity of that first sentence I quoted. A Pi 4 definitely has relatively decent specs for a small server or low end laptop. If this isn't a Power9 (aka the series that the G5 and the latest Power arch chips are a part of) then all this has going for it is the openness of it. Is it more open than a Pi 4? If they release a successor to the Compute Module 3+ with better specs and someone builds a laptop chassis around it, is there any reason I shouldn't just buy that?
pier25 7y ago
Óle!
nouveau0 7y ago
What year is this?
- unixhero 7y ago
  Is this diversity not a positive thing in your mind, even in 2019?
  - nouveau0 7y ago
    That was clearly sarcasm. I never said anything about diversity
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
kop316 7y ago
Is it just me, or is the fundraising campaign only for donations, and not to get a physical product? I would be far more interested to fund it if I knew I was getting a laptop, but as far as I can tell, that's not the case.
- katmannthree 7y ago
  Yes, the fundraising campaign is for engineering work for a PPC motherboard for an existing laptop chassis. I would also prefer sending them money in exchange for a physical product, but they're not at that point yet. They're asking for €24,000 which honestly seems a little low to cover the engineering work for an almost completely new laptop MB.
  - kop316 7y ago
    The only thing with that is usually 1 PCB is 24,000, but then 10 PCBs are 25,000 (i.e. making more is a lot cheaper than the first). If they have an existing chassis, than I would assume actually delivering a laptop isn't that difficult (famous last words, I understand).
    - katmannthree 7y ago
      >If they have an existing chassis, than I would assume actually delivering a laptop isn't that difficult (famous last words, I understand). From what I can tell there are three distinct groups involved: 1) Slimbook -- an existing small laptop vendor. I'm not sure if they have an active engineering role with their amd64 motherboards or if they're more of an integrator, but I believe ~~they do the engineering for their laptop chassis (unlike some other linux laptop "manufacturers" who sell rebranded Clevo notebooks)~~. Edit: It appears that the Slimbook laptops are likely also rebranded Clevo PCs. That's pretty disappointing. 2) ACube Systems -- an existing PowerPC board designer / vendor, whose engineers will do the actual work under contract(?) from Power Progress Community. 3) Power Progress Community -- PowerPC enthusiasts, the group soliciting donations, and writing the specs. It seems they plan to function as an integrator using Slimbook chassis and Acube Systems motherboards. All that is to say that I don't think the engineers working on the PPC board are the same ones who did the amd64 one.
BrainInAJar 7y ago
I had a powerpc laptop in 2005
unixhero 7y ago
What kind of bios or system ROM will it use? OpenFirmware?
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Open Firmware is the only firmware standard in existence to have its own theme song. https://web.archive.org/web/20070204145613/http://playground.sun.com/pub/1275/misc/ofwsong.au https://web.archive.org/web/20070204145613/http://playground... https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867724 OpenFirmware uses architecture independent FORTH byte code, so peripheral cards can include machine independent drivers and diagnostics! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware Open Firmware Forth Code may be compiled into FCode, a bytecode which is independent of computer architecture details such as the instruction set and memory hierarchy. A PCI card may include a program, compiled to FCode, which runs on any Open Firmware system. In this way, it can provide platform-independent boot-time diagnostics, configuration code, and device drivers. FCode is also very compact, so that a disk driver may require only one or two kilobytes. Therefore, many of the same I/O cards can be used on Sun systems and Macintoshes that used Open Firmware. FCode implements ANS Forth and a subset of the Open Firmware library. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844026 That same Open Firmware Forth system [1], which was developed by Mitch Bradley [2], was not only in the PowerPC Mac bios, but it was originally used for the SparcStation boot roms, and eventually in the OLPC, and it was even an IEEE Standard 1275-1994! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Bradley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Bradley In fact: the Open Firmware boot loader and plug-in card firmware interface technology, commonly used by both Sun and Apple, is the only firmware standard in existence to have its own theme song [3] !!! [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20070204145613/http://playground.sun.com/pub/1275/misc/ofwsong.au https://web.archive.org/web/20070204145613/http://playground... : OpenFirmwareSong ( - ) \ By Mitch Bradley. \ Sung to the tune of "The Flintstones". 𝄞 ." Firmware" cr ." Open Firmware" cr ." It's the appropriate technology," cr ." Features" cr ." FCode booting" cr ." Hierarchical DevInfo tree." cr ." Hack Forth" cr ." Using Emacs on the keys," cr ." Save in" cr ." NVRAM if you please." cr 𝄒 cr ." With your" cr ." Open Firmware" cr ." You can fix the bugs in no time" cr ." Bring the kernel up in no time" cr ." We'll have an FCode time!" cr 𝄒 cr \ Thank you and good night! reboot ;
tyingq 7y ago
My recollection is that PowerPC, like ARM, can be either big or little endian. But, that most OS implementations use little endian. Is that correct?
- arcticbull 7y ago
  PowerPCs have configurable endianness in the MSR register, but boot into big endian mode by default. macOS used it in big endian mode. Linux I can't speak to but believe you can pick based on kernel build config. As for IBM's OS' or the ones running on consoles, I can't speak to that. The interesting part is that the motherboard also needs to support the specific endianness chosen, and when running in little-endian mode, it needs to perform a 64-bit byte swap on all data going in or out [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC#Endian_modes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC#Endian_modes
  - kzrdude 7y ago
    Why does it have a switch for that, and wouldn't it have a big overhead?
    - arcticbull 7y ago
      I honestly have no idea haha. I speculate big machines dealing with legacy data or code not expecting big endian have an escape hatch that doesn't involve a complete rewrite.
    - ajdlinux 7y ago
      IBM has traditionally been a big-endian shop - mainframes are BE, AIX and IBM i on Power are BE. The Motorola 68K, which Apple was using before switching to PowerPC, was also BE. LE support was in the original PowerPC chips from the 90s, and was used to support the Windows NT port that existed until NT4. Then switchable endianness disappeared for a while, and finally came back in POWER8 when IBM decided it wanted to expand the market for Power and that LE was helpful because it makes porting easier and is more familiar to x86 programmers. It doesn't, AFAIK, have any overhead - remember that byte swapping can be done in combinational logic.
hsivonen 7y ago
Looks like this is 64-bit but big endian. Weird choice when a) POWER has gone little-endian and b) this a system whose form factor implies running a Web browser and the Web requires little-endian ArrayBuffer behavior these days, so not running on a natively little-endian CPU seems inefficient.
dragontamer 7y ago
The link seems to be getting the YCombinator hug-of-death. I can't read the article at all. Since POWER9 only exists in the server / HEDT sphere, I doubt this will be a modern POWER9 chip. Maybe something like a NXP-chip, which would still be interesting. Something on the scale of a Chromebook maybe? If binaries were compatible with the Talos II POWER9 HEDT / Server, then there is still a good use of this laptop. To serve as a portable development platform, much like Intel Atom can serve as a portable development platform for Intel Xeons. Depends on a lot of details however. Honestly, its probably more important to rack-up a POWER9 Talos II and just SSH into it every once in a while... modern cloud-based services makes this sort of thing much easier. ---------- EDIT: Site finally worked for me. NXP T2080 chip, 4-core / 8-thread 28nm class chip. e6500 core, which is some form of PowerPC for sure... 128-bit vector units (Altivec). 32kB L1 d$ and 32kB L1 I$, 2MB L2$ for the whole chip. This is older-tech for sure, definitely "Chromebook" level of tech, maybe a touch weaker even. EDIT2: I think there's something to be said about an "open" design, where the schematics are available for the community to use and extend. The NXP T2080 has good GPIO pins and connectivity, so there's a chance that this laptop will be easier to interface with electronically than other devices. Guys over at hackaday probably would love something like this. https://gitlab.com/oshw-powerpc-notebook/powerpc-laptop-mobo/blob/master/electrical_schematic_ppc_notebook_0_2_version_09_2019.pdf https://gitlab.com/oshw-powerpc-notebook/powerpc-laptop-mobo...
- kjs3 7y ago
  It's not Power. If I followed the links correctly, it's a 1GHz-ish PPC derivative from a shop you for whom processors are a minor part of their product line. The motherboards linked to appear to all top out at 2GB of SoDIMM memory. So maybe "that's cool" but not "that's generally useful" and personally not "I'll spend money on that".
  - dragontamer 7y ago
    https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/reference-manual/E6500RM.pdf https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/reference-manual/E6500RM.pdf > The e6500 core is a low-power, 64-bit, multi-threaded implementation of the resources for embedded processors defined by Power ISA Page 3-1 lists the instruction-groups from PowerISA that the e6500 supports.
filmgirlcw 7y ago
People are getting down-voted for asking what year it is, but I’m going to “what year is this?” I’m not discounting the effort that goes into place here — at least I’m trying not to — but like, why would anyone look at PowerPC for portables in 2019 when the whole reason Apple shifted to Intel 14 years ago was thermals? Wouldn’t ARM be better? I’m sure I’m missing something but I just don’t understand this on any level except for some obsession with “openness” at the expense of actually doing anything.
- pgeorgi 7y ago
  > when the whole reason Apple shifted to Intel 14 years ago was thermals? Wouldn’t ARM be better? The move to Intel wasn't because the instruction set is, for some reason, superior (it isn't), it's because IBM couldn't keep up with Intel's fabrication technology. The G5 chip from 2002 was at 130nm, while the Intel design introduced in 2006 (when 4 year old G5 was the best IBM had to offer) was at 65nm. The chip they aim for is built on a 28nm process (which has some impact on voltages used and minimum conversion of power into heat). That's definitely not top-class, but good enough: it's about a factor 3 to the state of the art (compared to factor 2 between G5 and Intel Core in 2006), but in absolute terms it's so much closer. There are enough ARM laptops out there, this provides another venue for more vendor independence (ARM still exerts tight control over its ISA while PowerPC is a close cousin to Power9 which was opened recently). In short, for a project like this, the goal isn't the very best performance on the market, it's "the more the merrier".
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    "The more the merrier" isn't true for proprietary ISAs at all. Think of all the work going into supporting it, of the limitations coming with a very exotic computer. These are things humans have to spend lifetime on. I think it's a huge waste. If this was about pushing RISC-V forward, I wouldn't say that, but only because I hope it takes over, not because I think having yet another ISA in the zoo is somehow good.
    - binarycrusader 7y ago
Gregordinary 7y ago
This is who they're working with: https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/2019/09/slimbook-to-provide-the-notebook-chassis/ https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/2019/09/slimbook-to-provide...
tengbretson 7y ago
Can't wait to get OS X 10.5.8 running on it!
locusofself 7y ago
I'm not sure about power PC, but about 15 years ago I was working on a MIPS based desktop linux system, and there was no way to get adobe flash to run on it, which at the time was a big deal. Could they have similar issues with media stuff (netflix, hulu etc) on a device like this?
- cmiles74 7y ago
  I think Google's Widevine (which is used for a lot of these DRM'd streams) is only available for Chrome. I think we'd need Google to provide a Chrome for PPC binary, which would require them to bundle a WideVine for PPC binary. https://www.widevine.com/ https://www.widevine.com/
  - heavyset_go 7y ago
    Widevine support is enabled in Firefox on 32 and 64-bit x86 platforms. binfmt_misc can enable Flash support.
    - cmiles74 7y ago
      I'm pretty sure they are using the binaries provided by Google. I don't think they can compile for another platform, like PPC. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm
      - heavyset_go 7y ago
        That's my point, Widevine is only available for certain platforms. You can abuse binfmt_misc for other incompatible software, though.
tombert 7y ago
Hmm, I wonder if this will be able to run AmigaOS natively. I've played with Aros a bit but I would love an excuse to play with "real" Amiga running natively, but the current PowerPC offerings for Amiga are obscenely overpriced.
- jug 7y ago
  That and MorphOS. There has been a huge gap there and these operating systems running out of new hardware. Any new hardware.
jakeogh 7y ago
Open? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21221602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21221602
DonHopkins 7y ago
If only IBM had come out with a PowerPC Thinkpad that ran MacOS in 1995 like IBM and Apple jointly promised was the whole point of CHRP: the Common Hardware Reference Platform. But nooooo, they thought all the cool kids wanted to run WARP, aka OS/2, aka "Half an Operating System". The great thing about the Thinkpads of 24 years ago was that they were so well built and modular and user serviceable that many of them would still be working even now. They were so much more solid and dependable than anything Apple ever produced in their entire history, and especially their shitty PowerPC laptops of that time period. It would have been the perfect Powerbook, but from IBM. But no, IBM and Apple couldn't stomach running Apple software, and Apple couldn't stomach their software running on robust reliable repairable hardware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_Platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_Plat... >Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) is a standard system architecture for PowerPC-based computer systems published jointly by IBM and Apple in 1995. Like its predecessor PReP, it was conceptualized as a design to allow various operating systems to run on an industry standard hardware platform, and specified the use of Open Firmware and RTAS for machine abstraction purposes. Unlike PReP, CHRP incorporated elements of the Power Macintosh architecture and was intended to support the classic Mac OS and NetWare, in addition to the four operating systems that had been ported to PReP at the time (Windows NT, OS/2, Solaris, and AIX). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware >Open Firmware, or OpenBoot in Sun Microsystems parlance, is a standard defining the interfaces of a computer firmware system, formerly endorsed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It originated at Sun, and has been used by Sun, Apple, IBM, ARM and most other non-x86 PCI chipset vendors. Open Firmware allows the system to load platform-independent drivers directly from the PCI card, improving compatibility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2 >The name stands for "Operating System/2", because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's "Personal System/2 (PS/2)" line of second-generation personal computers. IBM should have used this for the OS/2 theme song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ_03vnjJkA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ_03vnjJkA My previous comments on CHRP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438823 >At the time, IBM was making CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) PowerPC Thinkpads, which nobody could think of anything to do with because all they did was run OS/2, when everybody actually wanted them to run MacOS (but IBM refused to admit that was a good idea). That would have been the best of both worlds, back when Apple and IBM were in bed together (i.e. Kaleida, Taligent). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18393341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18393341 >CHRP was the Common Hardware Reference Platform for the PowerPC, which IBM and Apple collaborated on. IBM made a CHRP PowerPC Thinkpad that ran OS/2, but out of pride refused to sell one that ran MacOS, which kind of missed the whole point of CHRP. IBM just couldn't imagine why anyone would want to run anything but OS/2 on them. >I would have loved to have a MacOS powerbook running on wonderful Thinkpad hardware, because Apple's laptop hardware was pretty crappy at the time. It would have been the best of both worlds, but it was never to be.
Endy 7y ago
I will be very interested in this when they have a "give money, get laptop" situation set up. I'm glad to see more open hardware and software in the wild. But you'll have to excuse my skepticism as long as they need to run a fundraiser to get even the basic product together, let alone getting said product to market at a reasonable price for what it is.
- baybal2 7y ago
  Even that is not the end line. I knew a number of companies that had a Waterloo moments after very successful kickstarter campaigns with PCs and smarthones. Seeing a company making $1m+ on kickstarter, successfully delivering, and then committing big to mass manufacturing only to see single digit orders per day is something I see often in Shenzhen
  - Endy 7y ago
    Oh, certainly. But when it comes to advocating for free software (and free hardware to run it on), the end line is nothing less than the end of proprietary software. I'm not worried about reaching the end goal today, just taking a stride. My feeling is that if they can get to a situation where for, say, $200USD (or thereabouts), I can purchase their hardware with free software loaded on it and be relatively confident that it will arrive in working order, then I'm a happy camper. And I'll stand by that even if they can't remain in business after that point; because I will have gotten the machine I paid for. Until I can exchange currency for goods, it's just vaporware with an ideal attached.
DonHopkins 7y ago
Two questions come to mind: 1) Is it really a such great idea to give a product a name that is so rich in potential for satire and parody? 2) Does it come in green?
geoffreyhale 7y ago
I'd love it if someone would explain to me like I'm 5 years old. What is this? What's the point of value here / why care?
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Popular CPU instruction sets like your Intel/AMD 32 and 64bit machines are proprietary. Power is not. This like GNU/Linux but for CPUs.
coldnose 7y ago
Oh how I miss big-endian...
phs318u 7y ago
Everyone here has made a bunch of great points about this hardware, and massive props to the creators, and to IBM for open-sourcing the CPU. In light of that, this comment might sound a bit "shallow Hal", but... looking at the Slimbook's "Eclipse" case... nothing about that screams "slim".

171 points by jrepinc 7y ago

I have to say, I'm really happy that this seems a sort of resurgence of a proper CPU architecture diversity. I'm getting bored of the x86/ARM dichotomy.

tenebrisalietum 7y ago
Having few instruction set architectures, or even one, enables quicker and more efficient software development by lowering barrier to entry (easier to learn and study just one ISA instead of many) and lowering the amount of maintenance and development work that has to be done on development infrastructure such as compilers. This is assuming royalties don't have to be paid to an ISA creator, which is a separate issue. A single ISA doesn't have to mean there is a single CPU vendor or CPU manufacturer.
- panpanna 7y ago
  OpenBSD folks think supporting more architectures have helped them creating a better OS.
  - kjs3 7y ago
    Yup...Theo specifically talks about alignment restrictions on SPARC as catching all sorts of weird corner-case bugs.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  My usual take is that it gives us better efficiency in the short-term, at the expense of making it far more likely that we get stuck in a rut long-term.
  - dmix 7y ago
    Kinda like Japan's economy. Lots of old companies trying to keep up and very little outside entrepreneurship to disrupt and progress the industries.
- gnode 7y ago
  I agree that there's a programmer cost to having a multiplicity of ISAs. However, ISAs still have some relation to the design of the microarchitecture, which for x86 processors is not open. The RISC-V ISA for instance was created mainly because it helped the effort to create open CPU hardware.
- mnw21cam 7y ago
  In my opinion, having a single ISA breeds lazyness, and causes shortcuts to be made in programming. Like when the whole world got rid of all those esoteric 18-bit-word and worse architectures, and started writing loads of C for 32-bit i386. Then 64-bit came along and loads of software wouldn't compile properly without fixing things like assumptions of integer size, etc. It's why I am very glad that while Linux is very popular, there is still a BSD keeping programmers from going too crazy on the Linux-only features. We don't know what future architecture will exist. I would rather we have a multitude of architectures now, so that people write standards-conforming code rather than it-works-on-amd64/Linux code.
  - frozenport 7y ago
    Actually before x86 dominance, pre 90s many developers would write in ASM or convert C/pascal to ASM. This kind of code wasn't very portable.
  - gumby 7y ago
    The 18- ad 36-bit architectures weren't esoteric at the time! Though may of them also had bad (outdated, and not-obviously bad at the time) ideas like one's complement arithmetic. Machines like the PDP-10 were a pleasure to program in assembly, but I haven't written a line of assembly code in over a decade. But I agree the world is full of "slap it together and if it runs once, ship it" software -- that's what gave us Y2K. Time to re-read worse is better.
    - Aperocky 7y ago
      In retrospect, it's amazing how older games like Age of Empires work so well and (almost) bug free from the get go. In the software development environment for late 90s the amount of work to making sure that it works (without crashing!) is amazing. With extreme logging now our team still throws a bunch of internal errors today, granted our team is much smaller but still, those older games are amazing.
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      "If you're not working with 36 bits, you're not working with a full DEC!" -DIGEX (Doug Humphrey) trolling the 32-bit VAX weenies at DECUS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514918
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- madez 7y ago
  I think it is appropriate to specify your statement with a significant detail; a ISA monoculture enables quicker and more efficient development of proprietary software. Free and open software deals efficiently and fast with different ISA's, as can be seen in the ports of Debian and the targets of GCC.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Free software is great, but it's not efficiently developed. That's why it's been so hard for people to get a satisfactory Linux on the desktop GUI and it's still a crapshoot to even get all of a laptop working .
- pgeorgi 7y ago
  > Having few instruction set architectures, or even one, enables quicker and more efficient software development by lowering barrier to entry > A single ISA doesn't have to mean there is a single CPU vendor or CPU manufacturer. Then let's standardize on a single open and royalty-free one. That excludes x86 and ARM.
ken 7y ago
I'll celebrate implementation diversity, but I'm not sure why I'd celebrate interface diversity. All it does is create pointless incompatibilities that users have to deal with. I think it's great that many companies have their own implementation of open standards like Unicode, TCP/IP, and SMTP. Life was worse in every way when every company had their own special encodings for text files, and their own proprietary network protocols. I can type some text in Japanese and email it to a friend, in 2019, and it will just work. Excellent! The continued survival of x86 and other proprietary instruction sets reeks to me of the days of the "Best Viewed with ${browser}" badges. It's purely a pain point for users, for what appears to be merely a battle of egos among the world's richest megacorporations. Praising the growth of a third CPU opcode system sounds to me like wanting to bring back, say, the Scottish historical units of measurement, on the basis that we're "getting bored" with the SI/USCS duopoly. Bored is good! Bored means it works. I wish the USCS would die off, too, so I could be even more bored in that department.
kjs3 7y ago
SPARC has been open for a long time and there are numerous implementations. MIPS (and Longsoon) has been shipping forever. RISC-V is real. There's a project to create a re-implementation of SuperH. It's not like x86 & ARM is the only thing in the world...it's just the only thing that matters economically right now.

katmannthree 7y ago

This is incredibly exciting. Slimbook has made some excellent hardware in the past, with terrific software support. They're much closer to being the Macbooks of the Linux world than either Purism's or System76's offerings are.

Aperocky 7y ago
The only problem is are PowerPC/Linux up to task? Correct if I'm wrong but from what I know the entire linux ecosystem is geared toward X86/64 and if you're on other architecture the selection of software that works shrinks substantially. While we could just compile everything, there's still the problem of untested architecture integration, bugs that doesn't happen in X86 might happen in PowerPC/ARM and it's not a trivial issue to debug a compiler/bimodal action for instruction sets.
- zeta0134 7y ago
  You would think this, but it's preeeetty amazing how much of the Linux world works on an ARM-based Raspberry Pi. It's mostly a matter of finding the source and doing a proper cross-compile, but it's kinda incredible how much work the community has put into making the little board usable. The later models and their substantial bump in available RAM have made desktop computing plausible: I can run Blender to produce a 3D model, switch to Utilimaker Cura to slice it, then run Pronsole and send the .gcode out to the printer, all on the same device! It's not particularly fast, but it's usable at least, and the driver support an OpenGL in particular have come a long, long way. If a $35 (okay, $55 for the ones with 4 GB RAM) computer running an older down-clocked ARM can do this? I have little doubt that a POWER architecture could theoretically do it just as well, if not better since it should presumably be a much faster chip. I think it's mostly going to come down to support from both the vendor and the community, but I wouldn't write it off entirely.
  - brirec 7y ago
    > I have little doubt that a POWER architecture could theoretically do it just as well, if not better since it should presumably be a much faster chip. I think it's mostly going to come down to support from both the vendor and the community, but I wouldn't write it off entirely. I actually think it'll come down to the validity of that first sentence I quoted. A Pi 4 definitely has relatively decent specs for a small server or low end laptop. If this isn't a Power9 (aka the series that the G5 and the latest Power arch chips are a part of) then all this has going for it is the openness of it. Is it more open than a Pi 4? If they release a successor to the Compute Module 3+ with better specs and someone builds a laptop chassis around it, is there any reason I shouldn't just buy that?

pier25 7y ago

Óle!

nouveau0 7y ago

What year is this?

unixhero 7y ago
Is this diversity not a positive thing in your mind, even in 2019?
- nouveau0 7y ago
  That was clearly sarcasm. I never said anything about diversity
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

kop316 7y ago

Is it just me, or is the fundraising campaign only for donations, and not to get a physical product? I would be far more interested to fund it if I knew I was getting a laptop, but as far as I can tell, that's not the case.

katmannthree 7y ago
Yes, the fundraising campaign is for engineering work for a PPC motherboard for an existing laptop chassis. I would also prefer sending them money in exchange for a physical product, but they're not at that point yet. They're asking for €24,000 which honestly seems a little low to cover the engineering work for an almost completely new laptop MB.
- kop316 7y ago
  The only thing with that is usually 1 PCB is 24,000, but then 10 PCBs are 25,000 (i.e. making more is a lot cheaper than the first). If they have an existing chassis, than I would assume actually delivering a laptop isn't that difficult (famous last words, I understand).
  - katmannthree 7y ago
    >If they have an existing chassis, than I would assume actually delivering a laptop isn't that difficult (famous last words, I understand). From what I can tell there are three distinct groups involved: 1) Slimbook -- an existing small laptop vendor. I'm not sure if they have an active engineering role with their amd64 motherboards or if they're more of an integrator, but I believe ~~they do the engineering for their laptop chassis (unlike some other linux laptop "manufacturers" who sell rebranded Clevo notebooks)~~. Edit: It appears that the Slimbook laptops are likely also rebranded Clevo PCs. That's pretty disappointing. 2) ACube Systems -- an existing PowerPC board designer / vendor, whose engineers will do the actual work under contract(?) from Power Progress Community. 3) Power Progress Community -- PowerPC enthusiasts, the group soliciting donations, and writing the specs. It seems they plan to function as an integrator using Slimbook chassis and Acube Systems motherboards. All that is to say that I don't think the engineers working on the PPC board are the same ones who did the amd64 one.

BrainInAJar 7y ago

I had a powerpc laptop in 2005

unixhero 7y ago

What kind of bios or system ROM will it use? OpenFirmware?

DonHopkins 7y ago
Open Firmware is the only firmware standard in existence to have its own theme song. https://web.archive.org/web/20070204145613/http://playground.sun.com/pub/1275/misc/ofwsong.au https://web.archive.org/web/20070204145613/http://playground... https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867724 OpenFirmware uses architecture independent FORTH byte code, so peripheral cards can include machine independent drivers and diagnostics! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware Open Firmware Forth Code may be compiled into FCode, a bytecode which is independent of computer architecture details such as the instruction set and memory hierarchy. A PCI card may include a program, compiled to FCode, which runs on any Open Firmware system. In this way, it can provide platform-independent boot-time diagnostics, configuration code, and device drivers. FCode is also very compact, so that a disk driver may require only one or two kilobytes. Therefore, many of the same I/O cards can be used on Sun systems and Macintoshes that used Open Firmware. FCode implements ANS Forth and a subset of the Open Firmware library. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844026 That same Open Firmware Forth system [1], which was developed by Mitch Bradley [2], was not only in the PowerPC Mac bios, but it was originally used for the SparcStation boot roms, and eventually in the OLPC, and it was even an IEEE Standard 1275-1994! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Bradley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Bradley In fact: the Open Firmware boot loader and plug-in card firmware interface technology, commonly used by both Sun and Apple, is the only firmware standard in existence to have its own theme song [3] !!! [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20070204145613/http://playground.sun.com/pub/1275/misc/ofwsong.au https://web.archive.org/web/20070204145613/http://playground... : OpenFirmwareSong ( - ) \ By Mitch Bradley. \ Sung to the tune of "The Flintstones". 𝄞 ." Firmware" cr ." Open Firmware" cr ." It's the appropriate technology," cr ." Features" cr ." FCode booting" cr ." Hierarchical DevInfo tree." cr ." Hack Forth" cr ." Using Emacs on the keys," cr ." Save in" cr ." NVRAM if you please." cr 𝄒 cr ." With your" cr ." Open Firmware" cr ." You can fix the bugs in no time" cr ." Bring the kernel up in no time" cr ." We'll have an FCode time!" cr 𝄒 cr \ Thank you and good night! reboot ;

tyingq 7y ago

My recollection is that PowerPC, like ARM, can be either big or little endian. But, that most OS implementations use little endian. Is that correct?

arcticbull 7y ago
PowerPCs have configurable endianness in the MSR register, but boot into big endian mode by default. macOS used it in big endian mode. Linux I can't speak to but believe you can pick based on kernel build config. As for IBM's OS' or the ones running on consoles, I can't speak to that. The interesting part is that the motherboard also needs to support the specific endianness chosen, and when running in little-endian mode, it needs to perform a 64-bit byte swap on all data going in or out [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC#Endian_modes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC#Endian_modes
- kzrdude 7y ago
  Why does it have a switch for that, and wouldn't it have a big overhead?
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    I honestly have no idea haha. I speculate big machines dealing with legacy data or code not expecting big endian have an escape hatch that doesn't involve a complete rewrite.
  - ajdlinux 7y ago
    IBM has traditionally been a big-endian shop - mainframes are BE, AIX and IBM i on Power are BE. The Motorola 68K, which Apple was using before switching to PowerPC, was also BE. LE support was in the original PowerPC chips from the 90s, and was used to support the Windows NT port that existed until NT4. Then switchable endianness disappeared for a while, and finally came back in POWER8 when IBM decided it wanted to expand the market for Power and that LE was helpful because it makes porting easier and is more familiar to x86 programmers. It doesn't, AFAIK, have any overhead - remember that byte swapping can be done in combinational logic.

hsivonen 7y ago

Looks like this is 64-bit but big endian. Weird choice when a) POWER has gone little-endian and b) this a system whose form factor implies running a Web browser and the Web requires little-endian ArrayBuffer behavior these days, so not running on a natively little-endian CPU seems inefficient.

dragontamer 7y ago

The link seems to be getting the YCombinator hug-of-death. I can't read the article at all. Since POWER9 only exists in the server / HEDT sphere, I doubt this will be a modern POWER9 chip. Maybe something like a NXP-chip, which would still be interesting. Something on the scale of a Chromebook maybe? If binaries were compatible with the Talos II POWER9 HEDT / Server, then there is still a good use of this laptop. To serve as a portable development platform, much like Intel Atom can serve as a portable development platform for Intel Xeons. Depends on a lot of details however. Honestly, its probably more important to rack-up a POWER9 Talos II and just SSH into it every once in a while... modern cloud-based services makes this sort of thing much easier. ---------- EDIT: Site finally worked for me. NXP T2080 chip, 4-core / 8-thread 28nm class chip. e6500 core, which is some form of PowerPC for sure... 128-bit vector units (Altivec). 32kB L1 d$ and 32kB L1 I$, 2MB L2$ for the whole chip. This is older-tech for sure, definitely "Chromebook" level of tech, maybe a touch weaker even. EDIT2: I think there's something to be said about an "open" design, where the schematics are available for the community to use and extend. The NXP T2080 has good GPIO pins and connectivity, so there's a chance that this laptop will be easier to interface with electronically than other devices. Guys over at hackaday probably would love something like this. https://gitlab.com/oshw-powerpc-notebook/powerpc-laptop-mobo/blob/master/electrical_schematic_ppc_notebook_0_2_version_09_2019.pdf https://gitlab.com/oshw-powerpc-notebook/powerpc-laptop-mobo...

kjs3 7y ago
It's not Power. If I followed the links correctly, it's a 1GHz-ish PPC derivative from a shop you for whom processors are a minor part of their product line. The motherboards linked to appear to all top out at 2GB of SoDIMM memory. So maybe "that's cool" but not "that's generally useful" and personally not "I'll spend money on that".
- dragontamer 7y ago
  https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/reference-manual/E6500RM.pdf https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/reference-manual/E6500RM.pdf > The e6500 core is a low-power, 64-bit, multi-threaded implementation of the resources for embedded processors defined by Power ISA Page 3-1 lists the instruction-groups from PowerISA that the e6500 supports.

filmgirlcw 7y ago

People are getting down-voted for asking what year it is, but I’m going to “what year is this?” I’m not discounting the effort that goes into place here — at least I’m trying not to — but like, why would anyone look at PowerPC for portables in 2019 when the whole reason Apple shifted to Intel 14 years ago was thermals? Wouldn’t ARM be better? I’m sure I’m missing something but I just don’t understand this on any level except for some obsession with “openness” at the expense of actually doing anything.

pgeorgi 7y ago
> when the whole reason Apple shifted to Intel 14 years ago was thermals? Wouldn’t ARM be better? The move to Intel wasn't because the instruction set is, for some reason, superior (it isn't), it's because IBM couldn't keep up with Intel's fabrication technology. The G5 chip from 2002 was at 130nm, while the Intel design introduced in 2006 (when 4 year old G5 was the best IBM had to offer) was at 65nm. The chip they aim for is built on a 28nm process (which has some impact on voltages used and minimum conversion of power into heat). That's definitely not top-class, but good enough: it's about a factor 3 to the state of the art (compared to factor 2 between G5 and Intel Core in 2006), but in absolute terms it's so much closer. There are enough ARM laptops out there, this provides another venue for more vendor independence (ARM still exerts tight control over its ISA while PowerPC is a close cousin to Power9 which was opened recently). In short, for a project like this, the goal isn't the very best performance on the market, it's "the more the merrier".
- gridlockd 7y ago
  "The more the merrier" isn't true for proprietary ISAs at all. Think of all the work going into supporting it, of the limitations coming with a very exotic computer. These are things humans have to spend lifetime on. I think it's a huge waste. If this was about pushing RISC-V forward, I wouldn't say that, but only because I hope it takes over, not because I think having yet another ISA in the zoo is somehow good.
  - binarycrusader 7y ago

Gregordinary 7y ago

This is who they're working with: https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/2019/09/slimbook-to-provide-the-notebook-chassis/ https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/2019/09/slimbook-to-provide...

tengbretson 7y ago

Can't wait to get OS X 10.5.8 running on it!

locusofself 7y ago

I'm not sure about power PC, but about 15 years ago I was working on a MIPS based desktop linux system, and there was no way to get adobe flash to run on it, which at the time was a big deal. Could they have similar issues with media stuff (netflix, hulu etc) on a device like this?

cmiles74 7y ago
I think Google's Widevine (which is used for a lot of these DRM'd streams) is only available for Chrome. I think we'd need Google to provide a Chrome for PPC binary, which would require them to bundle a WideVine for PPC binary. https://www.widevine.com/ https://www.widevine.com/
- heavyset_go 7y ago
  Widevine support is enabled in Firefox on 32 and 64-bit x86 platforms. binfmt_misc can enable Flash support.
  - cmiles74 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure they are using the binaries provided by Google. I don't think they can compile for another platform, like PPC. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm
    - heavyset_go 7y ago
      That's my point, Widevine is only available for certain platforms. You can abuse binfmt_misc for other incompatible software, though.

tombert 7y ago

Hmm, I wonder if this will be able to run AmigaOS natively. I've played with Aros a bit but I would love an excuse to play with "real" Amiga running natively, but the current PowerPC offerings for Amiga are obscenely overpriced.

jug 7y ago
That and MorphOS. There has been a huge gap there and these operating systems running out of new hardware. Any new hardware.

jakeogh 7y ago

Open? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21221602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21221602

DonHopkins 7y ago

If only IBM had come out with a PowerPC Thinkpad that ran MacOS in 1995 like IBM and Apple jointly promised was the whole point of CHRP: the Common Hardware Reference Platform. But nooooo, they thought all the cool kids wanted to run WARP, aka OS/2, aka "Half an Operating System". The great thing about the Thinkpads of 24 years ago was that they were so well built and modular and user serviceable that many of them would still be working even now. They were so much more solid and dependable than anything Apple ever produced in their entire history, and especially their shitty PowerPC laptops of that time period. It would have been the perfect Powerbook, but from IBM. But no, IBM and Apple couldn't stomach running Apple software, and Apple couldn't stomach their software running on robust reliable repairable hardware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_Platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_Plat... >Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) is a standard system architecture for PowerPC-based computer systems published jointly by IBM and Apple in 1995. Like its predecessor PReP, it was conceptualized as a design to allow various operating systems to run on an industry standard hardware platform, and specified the use of Open Firmware and RTAS for machine abstraction purposes. Unlike PReP, CHRP incorporated elements of the Power Macintosh architecture and was intended to support the classic Mac OS and NetWare, in addition to the four operating systems that had been ported to PReP at the time (Windows NT, OS/2, Solaris, and AIX). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware >Open Firmware, or OpenBoot in Sun Microsystems parlance, is a standard defining the interfaces of a computer firmware system, formerly endorsed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It originated at Sun, and has been used by Sun, Apple, IBM, ARM and most other non-x86 PCI chipset vendors. Open Firmware allows the system to load platform-independent drivers directly from the PCI card, improving compatibility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2 >The name stands for "Operating System/2", because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's "Personal System/2 (PS/2)" line of second-generation personal computers. IBM should have used this for the OS/2 theme song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ_03vnjJkA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ_03vnjJkA My previous comments on CHRP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438823 >At the time, IBM was making CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) PowerPC Thinkpads, which nobody could think of anything to do with because all they did was run OS/2, when everybody actually wanted them to run MacOS (but IBM refused to admit that was a good idea). That would have been the best of both worlds, back when Apple and IBM were in bed together (i.e. Kaleida, Taligent). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18393341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18393341 >CHRP was the Common Hardware Reference Platform for the PowerPC, which IBM and Apple collaborated on. IBM made a CHRP PowerPC Thinkpad that ran OS/2, but out of pride refused to sell one that ran MacOS, which kind of missed the whole point of CHRP. IBM just couldn't imagine why anyone would want to run anything but OS/2 on them. >I would have loved to have a MacOS powerbook running on wonderful Thinkpad hardware, because Apple's laptop hardware was pretty crappy at the time. It would have been the best of both worlds, but it was never to be.

Endy 7y ago

I will be very interested in this when they have a "give money, get laptop" situation set up. I'm glad to see more open hardware and software in the wild. But you'll have to excuse my skepticism as long as they need to run a fundraiser to get even the basic product together, let alone getting said product to market at a reasonable price for what it is.

baybal2 7y ago
Even that is not the end line. I knew a number of companies that had a Waterloo moments after very successful kickstarter campaigns with PCs and smarthones. Seeing a company making $1m+ on kickstarter, successfully delivering, and then committing big to mass manufacturing only to see single digit orders per day is something I see often in Shenzhen
- Endy 7y ago
  Oh, certainly. But when it comes to advocating for free software (and free hardware to run it on), the end line is nothing less than the end of proprietary software. I'm not worried about reaching the end goal today, just taking a stride. My feeling is that if they can get to a situation where for, say, $200USD (or thereabouts), I can purchase their hardware with free software loaded on it and be relatively confident that it will arrive in working order, then I'm a happy camper. And I'll stand by that even if they can't remain in business after that point; because I will have gotten the machine I paid for. Until I can exchange currency for goods, it's just vaporware with an ideal attached.

DonHopkins 7y ago

Two questions come to mind: 1) Is it really a such great idea to give a product a name that is so rich in potential for satire and parody? 2) Does it come in green?

geoffreyhale 7y ago

I'd love it if someone would explain to me like I'm 5 years old. What is this? What's the point of value here / why care?

lonelappde 7y ago
Popular CPU instruction sets like your Intel/AMD 32 and 64bit machines are proprietary. Power is not. This like GNU/Linux but for CPUs.

coldnose 7y ago

Oh how I miss big-endian...

phs318u 7y ago

Everyone here has made a bunch of great points about this hardware, and massive props to the creators, and to IBM for open-sourcing the CPU. In light of that, this comment might sound a bit "shallow Hal", but... looking at the Slimbook's "Eclipse" case... nothing about that screams "slim".