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According to Raptor the newest generation of POWER chips contain a big binary proprietary blob. Would these pose a problem for the this foundation?
by ThinkBeat 1y ago
According to Raptor the newest generation of POWER chips contain a
big binary proprietary blob.
Would these pose a problem for the this foundation?
- net01 1y agolink ?
- p_l 1y agoNo - essentially a modern CPU is composed of multiple blocks, not just the actual CPU core. Some of those IP blocks will be closed source, often from third party vendors, and sometimes that means proprietary software blobs to interact with them (whether because the documentation to configure them is proprietary, or because you need to load proprietary microcode or firmware). The OpenPOWER foundation does not deal with entire CPU module / SoC component, and as such it's not really in their bailwick. The issue with POWER 10 cpus was that at least two important blocks without which the CPUs are essentially useless involved such third party components that required closed source firmware blobs to initialize. One of them was effectively the only OMI<->DDR4 (iirc) memory interface (OMI - serial link for memory, successor of POWER8/9 Centaur link), and the other was I think Synopsys' PCI-Express Root Ports