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Power and RISC-V are going after different markets. While Power is IRSC has a lot of legacy baggage that makes it significantly more complex that RISC-V (which
by bhouston 1y ago
Power and RISC-V are going after different markets.
While Power is IRSC has a lot of legacy baggage that makes it significantly more complex that RISC-V (which is clean slate and purposely simplified.) It is also definitely not optimized for low power situations / embedded.
It is basically super computer chip.
Also unlike ARM and RISC-V it isn't designed to be extensible/customized by users. It is more monolithic.
- cduzz 1y agoI wouldn't say "super computer" chip (or at least "supercomputer")... I've read the definition of a supercomputer as "some computer that takes specific domain, compute-bound problems and turns them into IO bound problems." (Implicitly, in that statement is the second statement of "and they have a ton of IO too). They're not really general purpose computers, and likely you'd be able to use risc-v or anything else, with specialized hardware, as the basis of a "supercomputer". The power platform, on the other-hand (I'll create a new word here) is a foundation for a "SuperEnterprise(tm)" computer. Power has insane / awesome things like "oh, you can use the ECC bits for ECC and hardware memory tagging[1]." Eventually such things may trickle down to things like ARM or RISC-V, but they're pioneered at the top of the enterprise mountain and trickle down... [1]https://www.devever.net/~hl/ppcas https://www.devever.net/~hl/ppcas
- bhouston 1y agoI guess I was referring to the fact that Power ISA chips were dominant at once time (prior to the rise of x86 chips) in the TOP 500 listings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#/media/File:Processor_families_in_TOP500_supercomputers.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#/media/File:Processor_f... They have faded from that over time from this niche. I do not know where they excel now.