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GNU/Linux Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook Project
- quanticle 5y agoUsing PPC in a laptop form factor is a really confusing choice, given that Apple abandoned PPC [1] in their laptops for Intel because they judged that there was no way that IBM was ever going to come out with a PPC chip that was ever going to be as power efficient as the comparable Intel parts. Their "Why PPC" page [2] makes no mention of power or thermal efficiency, and just states that PowerPC is better because the original version of the ISA was invented after x86 and ARM. By that logic Itanium is the best ISA of all! [1] https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/opinion-technology/15-years-ago-steve-jobs-ditched-powerpc-for-intel-processors-in-mac-computers-6472398/ https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/opinion-technol... [2] https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/why-powerpc/ https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/why-powerpc/
- pigeons 5y agoBecause Open hardware.
- autoliteInline 5y agoI figure someone might as well go whole-hog on that and build a PC with just a big ol' FPGA.
- flatiron 5y agoFpgas are very unsuitable general purpose computers. De10 nano is a very beefy fpga and can barely play doom acting like a general purpose 486 and lacks a fpga
- autoliteInline 5y agoOh well, I figured that a PowerPC Notebook was for hobbyists. What I would find fascinating is to think about languages and OSs for FPGA and try to break loose from the utterly boring C/Unix/68k,x86,MIPS,blah paradigm. Having something turnkey with attachment to various ports and a display would be kind of cool. Maybe that exists already. I worked on a project with a processor-on-an-FPGA and while it wasn't fast, the video codec in FPGA made it useful. Kind of a neat thing I think.
- flatiron 5y agoPpc notebook is a thing because ppc has been “open sourced” so you can just make ppc chips using great documentation with nobody knocking on your door. As a technology it’s dead as a door nail but it’s free as speech.
- lrvick 5y agoThat is being done too for when trust REALLY matters. See the Precursor.
- dragontamer 5y agoFPGAs are incredibly closed, outside of Lattice Semiconductor's tiny FPGAs (unsuitable for computers). In all practicality for "openness", any open-source advocate should rather use Intel/AMD than Xilinx/Altera. Closed-source synthesizers, closed source bootup, closed source loaders, etc. etc. You're pretty much trusting the FPGA software more than any CPU.
- duskwuff 5y ago> In all practicality for "openness", any open-source advocate should rather use Intel/AMD than Xilinx/Altera. That's an ironic comparison to make -- Intel bought Altera in 2015, and AMD is in the process of acquiring Xilinx. Between the two, though, there's been a lot more work done on open toolchains for Xilinx FPGAs.
- autoliteInline 5y agooh, bummer. So you'd need a clean tool chain too.
- zeckalpha 5y agoApple has since moved off of x86 for similar reasons. The issue is the fab process more than the architecture.
- lrvick 5y agoMany, myself included, would gladly take a major hit in battery life if it means having a machine we can actually trust. Trust means no ME backdoors, no random blobs which can be supply chain attack vectors. Freedom means I can do anything I want to the software and firmware and repair anything as needed long term without the consent of a corporation that has a financial interest in seeing their hardware go to a landfill in 2 years so people buy the latest.
- neilv 5y agoHow does the open/libre/trustworthy potential of PPC and Power products compare with RISC-V? Current, and near future? This is something I've been wondering. It's started looking like there will be a lot more hardware options based on RISC-V. Thus far, PPC/Power has had better libre options due to: https://www.raptorcs.com/ https://www.raptorcs.com/ I hope there will be healthy competition from open/libre/trustworthy and performant RISC-V boards.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- guerrilla 5y ago> open/libre/trustworthy potential It's not just potential but actual: Those Raptor workstations and servers already have coreboot firmware and run Linux (and whatever BSDs run on PPC today.)
- neilv 5y agoAgreed for current, over recent years. But what about near-future, with multiple sources of performant RISC-V CPUs? And will a larger variety of boards follow, possibly including very libre ones like Raptor does for Power?
- tcmart14 5y agoI don't want to put words in the mouth of who you are responding to, but here would be my assumption. PPC is probably in a better position for mass distribution in the short term. Where as RISC-V still has some time to go before we can get there at modern performance in a package that goes in consumer hardware. Also, just have more architectures means more possibilities of design decisions and more choice, which is always good.
- heeeman 5y agoThey are not aiming for the "ultrabook" form factor, but rather the mobile workstation form factor. According to the leaflet from NXP, the CPU has a "typical" power consumption of ~15W - if that means under load, it would be in the ballpark of Intel and AMD mobile CPUs, as far as I understand.
- duskwuff 5y agoWhat's even more confusing is their choice of parts. The NXP QorIQ line is designed for use in networking hardware, not in mobile devices -- it has limited power management functionality, and, as best I was able to tell when I looked into this last year [2], has idle power consumption somewhere around 7W, ramping up to 20W under load. It's not especially fast, either -- it's only got four cores at 1.8 GHz. Most new cell phones will run rings around it. My best guess is that they somehow decided on the PowerPC architecture before evaluating what parts were available, and realized too late that nobody makes mobile PowerPC SoCs... [1]: https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers/power-architecture/qoriq-communication-processors/t-series/qoriq-t2080-and-t2081-multicore-communications-processors:T2080 https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188796
- nine_k 5y agoIndeed, they must have decided on the Power architecture first, because it's available and can run without proprietary binary blobs. That was the key consideration, I think. Otherwise picking an Intel or AMD part would be much more efficient from many angles.
- duskwuff 5y ago> because it's available and can run without proprietary binary blobs Which isn't even necessarily true. The POWER architecture is just an ISA. It doesn't specify anything about how the rest of the system works. (The POWER Architecture Platform does exist, but, as far as I know, it's only used in IBM's POWER servers.) Conversely, it's hardly as though POWER is the only architecture this is true of. Coincidentally, NXP also sells a line of ARM SoCs (the i.MX line) which can be used in a blob-free mode, and there are already several open hardware laptops built around those parts!
- eqvinox 5y agoFully agree, but at the same time I'm hard pressed to think of an alternative that doesn't need binary blobs to bring up & is better in terms of power usage / efficiency. Most modern chips really can't initialize themselves anymore without feeding them some blob, most frequently for DDR controller calibration but also sometimes SERDES bits. That said I'm not sure why this should be treated harsher than if the same code were burned into a mask ROM on the chip. The latter case would be acceptable for "blob-free open hardware enthusiasts". It's a rather arbitrary distinction IMHO. add.P.S.: my personal goal would be a system where I control 100% of all running code starting at the bootloader. Most of these initialization blobs are one-shots, e.g. push the appropriate electronic parameters into some high-speed analog block. But this means no Intel ME & no AMD PSP, please. It also means no "power management" coprocessor (reasonably common on ARM SoCs), not even due to openness or trust concerns but rather because I've been bitten by bugs in those… :(
- _ph_ 5y agoI wouldn't think that PowerPC is ill suited for reasonably low power designs. It is a RISC chip after all. And up to and including the G4, they ran very well in the Apple laptops. Only the IBM-made G5 was a very hot beast, perhaps because it pushed the cpu frequency beyond the comfort zone for its process in the attempt to keep up with Intel. But a fresh design with a modern process could yield very low power and still well performing chips. Even the Itanium, which had a reputation for being power-hungry probably would be efficient enough to be used in a smart phone, if ported to the TSMC 7nm technology.
- nine_k 5y agoA ton of ARM designs are RISC chips, because ARM stands for Advanced RISC Machines. Somehow they power nearly 100% of mobile phones, and various other mobile devices.
- _ph_ 5y agoYes, of course, all ARMs are RISC chips. That is why I think a reasonably designed and manufactured PowerPC should have similar power and performance characteristics.
- ksec 5y agoI am surprised this is the most upvoted comments. Energy efficiency of a chip has relative little if not close to zero relation to the choice of ISA in PC usage. Apple moved to Intel because of Fabs and uArch design choices.
- ksec 5y agoPeople may want to explain why you downvote? Both Pentium 4 and Pentium M are x86? What has the ISA got to do with it? Seriously? Intel had the Fab advantage at the time, and IBM didn't want to design Laptop based computer chips. It was as simple as that. It has nothing to do with PowerPC incapable of making energy efficient chip.
- yyyk 5y agoIf they went for a NUC/Apple Mini form factor that would have been an interesting (and easier) first try: A meaningful difference from Talos, yet a less restrictive power budget than laptops.
- ronsor 5y agoI hope it's not big endian. A lot of modern software now just expects everything to be little endian, and won't work properly.
- johnklos 5y agoYeah! Let's not fix the software and the bad assumptions some programmers make - let's all just do what's simplest for the bad programmers. What could go wrong? ;) Seriously, there's zero reason why endianness should matter in code. All good code compiles and runs on whatever endian system you want. If it doesn't, then it's buggy and broken and should be fixed, and whoever wrote it should be ashamed.
- jayd16 5y ago>Seriously, there's zero reason why endianness should matter in code How about wanting to share binary blobs between architectures without spending the effort to marshal things.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoHow would binary blobs work on a different architecture regardless of endian-ness?
- zdw 5y agohtonl and ntohl would like a word.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoYou mean https://linux.die.net/man/3/htonl https://linux.die.net/man/3/htonl ? What does that have to do with executing binaries on another architecture?
- nonesuchluck 5y ago
- Y_Y 5y agoThat website is a trainwreck on mobile firefox. Two screen-covering popups and wrong language detection.
- MrGilbert 5y agoSame on Safari. That's not how one should do it in 2021… Welp, I'll just skip the article then.
- csilverman 5y agoAgreed. They’ve disabled reader mode, too. Took one look at that mess and decided I didn’t care enough to even try tapping the deliberately minuscule X buttons. I’m at the point where I am so done with disrespectful websites that I’m willing to forgo information I’d otherwise care about just so I don’t have to engage with them.
- bqmjjx0kac 5y agoSame here, I consider it voting with my back button.
- duskwuff 5y agoThree popups on desktop, one of which collapses into a large, persistent "chat" bubble in the upper left of the window. Not to judge a book by its cover, but this certainly doesn't speak well for the level of care put into this project.
- jensenbox 5y agoI cannot help but feel overwhelmed by the craptacular pixels being thrown at me. I closed the site immediately and likely will not return.
- na85 5y agoThree popups for me on mobile Firefox. Closed the tab after that. The web is so fucking awful these days.
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
- threshold 5y agoThese guys can’t design a website I’m not giving them money to build a laptop. And why PowerPC? And if they have prototypes coming in October where are the photos? Not one photo of a PCB. This is vaporware.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jrururufuf666 5y agocant donate in crypto, too bad
- mch82 5y agoAre many people seeking charities that accept crypto donations? Or, at least, are there crypto donors?
- jrururufuf666 5y agocrypto people are very generous. many made insane gains and are willing to donate to good causes.
- 1MachineElf 5y agoConceivably, a similar PowerPC motherboard could be put into a Framework Laptop. I wonder if this project would have considered going that route if the timing had been right.
- kitsunesoba 5y agoIt's not at all the market this is aimed at, but movement in the direction of obtainably-priced new PPC hardware is exciting to me because it means that there's new hardware that can run classic Mac OS closer to the metal — potentially very close with a thin hypervisor layer that bridges the gap between what Mac OS is expecting and how the hardware actually is. As for why it's exciting, emulation of classic Macs still has large holes (e.g. GPUs aren't emulated well enough to support 3D games) and is generally buggy, which will be a problem when all the old PPC Macs have broken beyond repair. A vast amount of unique software will be rendered not practically usable. There's also just a little bit of something lost in emulation… all the bits of added latency and quirks pile up to dampen the positive aspects of those old systems.
- ThinkBeat 5y agoI would be happy with an affordable Power10 workstation. I want that more than ARM or RISCV. Raptor starts at around $3800 and goes way up. Been dreaming about one of those for a long time. My workstation now costs about $16.000 (And they dont feature the Power10 yet)
- nine_k 5y agoBTW what do you do on a workstation this large? Mechanical / electronic CAD and modeling? Video / animation? Computer chemistry?
- ThinkBeat 5y agowell, I think on a geeky place like this forum a geek should never be asked "why" he needs something: p I do photography, video editing, video conversion on the personal side and research into distributed and parallel execution for a programming language I am working on at work. I have a lot of VMs running at the same time, compiling the programming language is time consuming. I have also made some hacky alterations to the Linux kernel so I get to compile that one a lot too.
- pabs3 5y agoThe reason for Raptor not having POWER10 is due to IBM introducing some proprietary blobs, IIRC for RAM bringup and something else.