6 ms·

> To be fair, POWER is an open standard, and there's absolutely nothing stopping someone like Linode, DigitalOcean, or Hetzner from offering POWER-based system

by DCKing 6y ago

> To be fair, POWER is an open standard, and there's absolutely nothing stopping someone like Linode, DigitalOcean, or Hetzner from offering POWER-based systems at a smaller hourly price. Well besides the fact that 1) IBM is the only party with both the capabilities and interest in making high performance Power based products [1], and 2) evidently does not understand how to (or why to) invest in bringing this to a general audience. I don't really care if they would do this in IBM Cloud or with other cloud infrastructure companies, but they don't seem to be doing either. In addition 3) why would other parties be interested in running Power when they can run amd64 or arm? It certainly doesn't look to have a price advantage... IBM really needs to shepherd Power well - they're the only ones that can do it. But I can't help but thinking they seem to be leading it to the grave despite apparently very capable engineering. [1]: And why would anyone but IBM go for Power at this point if they can have ARM too? An open license matters very little when compared to ARM's mindshare and momentum.

jabl 6y ago
As it is, POWER is on a slow decline towards irrelevance by focusing only on milking their existing enterprise customers as long as it lasts. Which is a huge shame, the POWER ISA per se is mostly fine, and their commitment to open firmware etc. for trustworthy computing (see Raptor) is a niche that for some reason interests nobody else. If they want to turn it around and compete with x86, ARM and maybe even RISC-V on the low end, they need to commit to openpower. Get some interesting cores open sourced under the openpower umbrella, docs, open source bus interfaces for connecting stuff on a SOC, etc. And get some decent priced hardware into the hands of hobbyists and as dev boards for embedded.

6 ms·

> To be fair, POWER is an open standard, and there's absolutely nothing stopping someone like Linode, DigitalOcean, or Hetzner from offering POWER-based system

by DCKing 6y ago

jabl 6y ago
As it is, POWER is on a slow decline towards irrelevance by focusing only on milking their existing enterprise customers as long as it lasts. Which is a huge shame, the POWER ISA per se is mostly fine, and their commitment to open firmware etc. for trustworthy computing (see Raptor) is a niche that for some reason interests nobody else. If they want to turn it around and compete with x86, ARM and maybe even RISC-V on the low end, they need to commit to openpower. Get some interesting cores open sourced under the openpower umbrella, docs, open source bus interfaces for connecting stuff on a SOC, etc. And get some decent priced hardware into the hands of hobbyists and as dev boards for embedded.