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> 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 sour
by classichasclass 1y 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 1y agoThe 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 1y agoUnfortunately, going from there to an affordable chip with reasonable performance doesn't seem possible.
- Pet_Ant 1y agoWell you could just buy a T2 chip, but I don't know that Sun would sell them outside of an entire system.
- classichasclass 1y agoThat'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 agoI 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.