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> Which parts of the POWER architecture design belong to yesterday? Specific examples would be great. Is this a troll post? How about the fact that POWER9 is n

> Which parts of the POWER architecture design belong to yesterday? Specific examples would be great. Is this a troll post? How about the fact that POWER9 is nearly 7 years old and was more than a generation behind it's competitors at the time it launched?

Brian_K_White 3y ago
Is this a troll answer? I don't see any specific example of what exactly is bad about it in this reply, so, the question remains open. If the answer would be so obvious that the question must be a disingenuous troll question, then surely it must be effortless to give a meaningful answer. It's a terrible architecture because it...what? What obviously backwards and never can and never could possibly work idea does it try to implement? Not even my question but I just found criticizing the question with this answer pretty rich.
- Shekelphile 3y ago
  Can't imagine resorting to being this snarky in the defense of a flawed CPU micro architecture. It takes 30 seconds with a search engine to find benchmarks: https://www.phoronix.com/review/power9-epyc-xeon/3 https://www.phoronix.com/review/power9-epyc-xeon/3 It is, quite literally, half as performant as it's contemporaries while drawing more power. Beyond being 'open', these CPUs are duds and wastes of sand.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    I can't be defending something I don't know or care about. The purpose of the comment was stated plainly.
tw1984 3y ago
They are just emotional. Certain vintage tech/gears are being linked to those good old days when certain techs (e.g. SMP and Unix) were only available to selected few. The reality is clear here, we are talking about a totally failed ISA that has no economic future whatsoever.
- inkyoto 3y ago
  Emotional? Hardly. I am not affiliated with POWER and have never been. But I like good hardware, good design ideas and debating them. One could pin me on maybe getting touchy in relation to my own pet ISA design that is a unholy matrimony of an 128-bit extension of the original PDP-11 architecture, ideas from i860, AMD29k and NEC SH-4 that I have been toying around and chugging along with, running on a FPGA at home as well as running a NetBSD port on it – for fun and as an outlet when I get frustrated with the enterprise-y world where I work. But it is my own _pet_ project where I have unbashed freedom to try anything out however silly or impractical the idea is, and where I can't expect others to agree with the ideas I am entertaining. We could have been debating the merits of the POWER vs ARM CHERI tagged memory architectures and their implications on the compiler design. Or, we could have been disagreeing on the merits of the POWER CPU assisted translation of the ISA's for z/Series IBM mainframes (with the physical CPU long, long not being in existence and POWER CPU's emulating the ISA instead) and AS/400 (or whatever it is named today – the ISA that has never been implemented in the hardware anyway and has always been virtual and powered by POWER CPU's) vs alternatives, in hardware or in software. We could have also been locking horns over the original Cray vector instructions vs the RISC-V vector extension designs. Or, how 96x slices in a 24x core POWER CPU stack up against competing 96 core CPU designs. Or, agree and disagree how advances in the modern compiler design could have made VLIW architectures more practical today and not. Or something else. But this: > […] X86/ARM are highly successful, being 30-40 years old proves that they are well maintained […] > […] POWER lost the competition, it is done, it should be depreciated. With that in mind, its 35 years history is not a fancy record, it is proof that not many people are going to pick that junk up again […] is not worth responding to. Such comments belong in Slashdot, Reddit and similar internet forums. We like picking things apart on here, so please allow us to endulge in it.
  - helf 3y ago
    [dead]
  - ksec 3y ago
    >Such comments belong in Slashdot, Reddit and similar internet forums. Before 2014, most internet reporters, even if they knew HN, they wont name it. Or at best "an orange website". It is as if an accepted culture or a norm for not linking to it. To prevent the site from becoming reddit or slashdot. Somewhere along the line everyone started naming / linking to it. That is why when ever people ask where to look for high quality information or discussion, I hesitate to even name the few site I bookmarked. Where you would find not only hard core enthusiast but also professional or industry veteran offering their informed opinion.

Brian_K_White 3y ago

Is this a troll answer? I don't see any specific example of what exactly is bad about it in this reply, so, the question remains open. If the answer would be so obvious that the question must be a disingenuous troll question, then surely it must be effortless to give a meaningful answer. It's a terrible architecture because it...what? What obviously backwards and never can and never could possibly work idea does it try to implement? Not even my question but I just found criticizing the question with this answer pretty rich.

Shekelphile 3y ago
Can't imagine resorting to being this snarky in the defense of a flawed CPU micro architecture. It takes 30 seconds with a search engine to find benchmarks: https://www.phoronix.com/review/power9-epyc-xeon/3 https://www.phoronix.com/review/power9-epyc-xeon/3 It is, quite literally, half as performant as it's contemporaries while drawing more power. Beyond being 'open', these CPUs are duds and wastes of sand.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  I can't be defending something I don't know or care about. The purpose of the comment was stated plainly.

tw1984 3y ago

They are just emotional. Certain vintage tech/gears are being linked to those good old days when certain techs (e.g. SMP and Unix) were only available to selected few. The reality is clear here, we are talking about a totally failed ISA that has no economic future whatsoever.

inkyoto 3y ago
Emotional? Hardly. I am not affiliated with POWER and have never been. But I like good hardware, good design ideas and debating them. One could pin me on maybe getting touchy in relation to my own pet ISA design that is a unholy matrimony of an 128-bit extension of the original PDP-11 architecture, ideas from i860, AMD29k and NEC SH-4 that I have been toying around and chugging along with, running on a FPGA at home as well as running a NetBSD port on it – for fun and as an outlet when I get frustrated with the enterprise-y world where I work. But it is my own _pet_ project where I have unbashed freedom to try anything out however silly or impractical the idea is, and where I can't expect others to agree with the ideas I am entertaining. We could have been debating the merits of the POWER vs ARM CHERI tagged memory architectures and their implications on the compiler design. Or, we could have been disagreeing on the merits of the POWER CPU assisted translation of the ISA's for z/Series IBM mainframes (with the physical CPU long, long not being in existence and POWER CPU's emulating the ISA instead) and AS/400 (or whatever it is named today – the ISA that has never been implemented in the hardware anyway and has always been virtual and powered by POWER CPU's) vs alternatives, in hardware or in software. We could have also been locking horns over the original Cray vector instructions vs the RISC-V vector extension designs. Or, how 96x slices in a 24x core POWER CPU stack up against competing 96 core CPU designs. Or, agree and disagree how advances in the modern compiler design could have made VLIW architectures more practical today and not. Or something else. But this: > […] X86/ARM are highly successful, being 30-40 years old proves that they are well maintained […] > […] POWER lost the competition, it is done, it should be depreciated. With that in mind, its 35 years history is not a fancy record, it is proof that not many people are going to pick that junk up again […] is not worth responding to. Such comments belong in Slashdot, Reddit and similar internet forums. We like picking things apart on here, so please allow us to endulge in it.
- helf 3y ago
  [dead]
- ksec 3y ago
  >Such comments belong in Slashdot, Reddit and similar internet forums. Before 2014, most internet reporters, even if they knew HN, they wont name it. Or at best "an orange website". It is as if an accepted culture or a norm for not linking to it. To prevent the site from becoming reddit or slashdot. Somewhere along the line everyone started naming / linking to it. That is why when ever people ask where to look for high quality information or discussion, I hesitate to even name the few site I bookmarked. Where you would find not only hard core enthusiast but also professional or industry veteran offering their informed opinion.