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Power9 is actually made at GlobalFoundries. And it's mostly just in (fading) IBM i systems and one-off super computers. Power 10 is supposedly on the horizon.

by salmo 5y ago

Power9 is actually made at GlobalFoundries. And it's mostly just in (fading) IBM i systems and one-off super computers. Power 10 is supposedly on the horizon. There's a handful of niche workstations, and "a partnership" with Google/Rackspace, but I can't even see how to get one of those via GCP or Rackspace. It's an interesting chip, and I'm a big fan of CPU diversity, but Power's time has come and gone. It's really only supported internally at this point: IBM i, AIX, RedHat, with Debian and (Open|Free)BSD as the outliers. We'll just have ARM and RISC-V as non-x86 "real" CPUs, I guess.

spijdar 5y ago
I think you're underselling it a bit. It's supported on RHEL, SUSE, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, several more niche distros besides, but aren't those the dominant OSes outside Windows (for servers/workstations)? Unless I'm misinterpreting the meaning of "outliers". And support goes out pretty far. Just to rattle some examples of public "support" for power8/9, Anaconda lists power9 binaries under x86 for their installer (no mention of ARM), PyPy has Power support, V8 has Power support (the basis for Power ports of Chromium w/JIT'd javascript), nvidia has Power drivers/CUDA runtimes on their main download portal. I'm not trying to paint it as largely supported or even a great platform, but I think it might now be better supported than it ever has been. It's little-endian now, software compatibility is almost 100% outside of JIT'd things (and many JIT'd things have Power ports). If/when it fails or fades away, it'll be because it wasn't good enough to displace the alternatives, rather than because no one supported it or it was too difficult to use/support.
cjsplat 5y ago
Power systems seem to still be available inside the Google Cloud : https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/ibm-sg/ibm-power-cloud-for-gcp https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/ibm-sg/... https://www.google.com/search?q=google+cloud+IBM+power https://www.google.com/search?q=google+cloud+IBM+power has lots of stuff, including a video from 2 years back about how to fire a Power VM up and use it : //www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0ml4AwewXo (disclaimer : Ex-googler, involved once upon a time in the project, no current knowledge of status).
yyyk 5y ago
Raptor Computing offers (expensive) Power9 workstations, so it's not impossible to get. But yeah, even seeing it is rare. Maybe some console could use a Power chip again (like the GameCube/Wii), though I doubt it.

by salmo 5y ago

spijdar 5y ago

I think you're underselling it a bit. It's supported on RHEL, SUSE, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, several more niche distros besides, but aren't those the dominant OSes outside Windows (for servers/workstations)? Unless I'm misinterpreting the meaning of "outliers". And support goes out pretty far. Just to rattle some examples of public "support" for power8/9, Anaconda lists power9 binaries under x86 for their installer (no mention of ARM), PyPy has Power support, V8 has Power support (the basis for Power ports of Chromium w/JIT'd javascript), nvidia has Power drivers/CUDA runtimes on their main download portal. I'm not trying to paint it as largely supported or even a great platform, but I think it might now be better supported than it ever has been. It's little-endian now, software compatibility is almost 100% outside of JIT'd things (and many JIT'd things have Power ports). If/when it fails or fades away, it'll be because it wasn't good enough to displace the alternatives, rather than because no one supported it or it was too difficult to use/support.

cjsplat 5y ago

Power systems seem to still be available inside the Google Cloud : https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/ibm-sg/ibm-power-cloud-for-gcp https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/ibm-sg/... https://www.google.com/search?q=google+cloud+IBM+power https://www.google.com/search?q=google+cloud+IBM+power has lots of stuff, including a video from 2 years back about how to fire a Power VM up and use it : //www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0ml4AwewXo (disclaimer : Ex-googler, involved once upon a time in the project, no current knowledge of status).

yyyk 5y ago

Raptor Computing offers (expensive) Power9 workstations, so it's not impossible to get. But yeah, even seeing it is rare. Maybe some console could use a Power chip again (like the GameCube/Wii), though I doubt it.