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I believe Intel and AMD motherboards all have proprietary firmware and the Talos systems are puritanically open. (But the processor itself is closed so there's

I believe Intel and AMD motherboards all have proprietary firmware and the Talos systems are puritanically open. (But the processor itself is closed so there's that. Could have gone with SPARC Niagara which was open sourced https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/sun-open-sources-second-niagara-chip/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/sun-open-sources-second-... )

classichasclass 2y ago
> But the processor itself is closed The microarch is closed and IBM-specific. However, the ISA is open and royalty-free, and the on-chip firmware is open source and you can build it yourself. In this sense it's at least as open as, say, many RISC-V implementations.
- Pet_Ant 2y ago
  The Sun Niagara 2 even has the Verilog RTL available. That is several orders of magnitude more open than the IBM. > Verilog RTL for OpenSPARC T2 design > Verification environment for OpenSPARC T2 > Diagnostics tests for OpenSPARC T2 > Scripts and Sun internal tools needed to simulate the design and to do synthesis of the design > Open source tools needed to simulate the design https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t2-page.html https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t2-pag...
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    Unfortunately, going from there to an affordable chip with reasonable performance doesn't seem possible.
    - Pet_Ant 2y ago
      Well you could just buy a T2 chip, but I don't know that Sun would sell them outside of an entire system.
      - classichasclass 2y ago
        That's another difference: there are actually retail channels for new POWER9 chips. I bought at least one of mine that way. You can certainly get Power cores with the VHDL and everything; the most notable of these is Microwatt, and IBM even maintains it. There are also A2O and A2I. That said, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that a company that put R&D money into designing a high performance chip should give away the store. There has to be some incentive. I'm satisfied that I don't have any unexplained or opaque firmware blobs in my POWER9 chips and the ISA and its internal workings are well-documented. That was good enough for the FSF, and it's good enough for me.
        rbanffy 1y ago
        I wouldn't mind a POWER10 machine not open-source from the ground up as the Talos machines. Cost/performance is a more important metric for me. There is a deskside POWER10 machine from IBM, that uses their smaller half-rack server, but it has somewhat limited expansion capabilities.

classichasclass 2y ago

> But the processor itself is closed The microarch is closed and IBM-specific. However, the ISA is open and royalty-free, and the on-chip firmware is open source and you can build it yourself. In this sense it's at least as open as, say, many RISC-V implementations.

Pet_Ant 2y ago
The Sun Niagara 2 even has the Verilog RTL available. That is several orders of magnitude more open than the IBM. > Verilog RTL for OpenSPARC T2 design > Verification environment for OpenSPARC T2 > Diagnostics tests for OpenSPARC T2 > Scripts and Sun internal tools needed to simulate the design and to do synthesis of the design > Open source tools needed to simulate the design https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t2-page.html https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t2-pag...
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Unfortunately, going from there to an affordable chip with reasonable performance doesn't seem possible.
  - Pet_Ant 2y ago
    Well you could just buy a T2 chip, but I don't know that Sun would sell them outside of an entire system.
    - classichasclass 2y ago
      That's another difference: there are actually retail channels for new POWER9 chips. I bought at least one of mine that way. You can certainly get Power cores with the VHDL and everything; the most notable of these is Microwatt, and IBM even maintains it. There are also A2O and A2I. That said, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that a company that put R&D money into designing a high performance chip should give away the store. There has to be some incentive. I'm satisfied that I don't have any unexplained or opaque firmware blobs in my POWER9 chips and the ISA and its internal workings are well-documented. That was good enough for the FSF, and it's good enough for me.
      - rbanffy 1y ago
        I wouldn't mind a POWER10 machine not open-source from the ground up as the Talos machines. Cost/performance is a more important metric for me. There is a deskside POWER10 machine from IBM, that uses their smaller half-rack server, but it has somewhat limited expansion capabilities.