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IBM Plans Collaboration On Power Architecture
TheInternet writes "According to CNET News, IBM has made a series of announcements regarding the opening-up of the Power chip architecture. The story lacks technical details, but apparently, IBM is going to divulge more information about Power/PowerPC, and expects collaboration from the industry on the future of the chip. Nick Donofrio is quoted as saying: 'We will free electronics manufacturers from the limitations of proprietary microprocessor architectures', and Red Hat and Sony are two companies listed as taking part. Power5 was also shown, as was the Blue Gene/L supercomputer, using 32 500MHz processors to achieve 128 gigaflops."
From Tom's Hardware: IBM's processor plans: Build your own microchip.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
This fits with IBM's vision for spreading the 970. There's two groups: "Pervasive" and "Deep." IBM uses "pervasive" to describe a wide range wired and wireless devices powered by the 970 chips, (i.e. p2p sharing of naked petrified natalie portman pictures). "Deep" computing describes IBM's high performance technical computing products, like Blue Gene.
Opening the architecture swings the door for pervasive market penetration, indeed.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
128 Gigaflops? April's Fools!
(Hey, it's started already, just look at that pigeon story).
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
The license that comes with OS X (and other Apple software as far as I know) says that you cannot install the software on non-Apple hardware. Probably doesn't worry them at all as far as corporate customers.
Does apple have any say in this at all? What's to stop people from building custom Macs?
Macs have custom ROM chips on their motherboards. So you would need to track down an Apple motherboard in order to build your own. Hard to do but not impossible
IBM has seen how well the Open Source/Community model has worked for Linux. Now they believe that it will benefit the deployment of POWER derived technology.
The details are a little sketchy at this point, but Wladawsky-Berger basically said this is of the same magnitude as the decision to embrace Linux.
I think I heard the word "community" in almost every other sentence. I truly believe IBM "gets it" and is moving forward in bold direction. The people I talked to afterward were credible and excited.
There will be a longer story on ClusterWorld tomorrow. (sign up for three free issues of the magazine as well)
I saw the small "Blue Gene" system. Very cool both performance wise and thermally (32 CPUs in a table top box). I also saw the new Power blade server. Nice.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
As the POWER arcitecture is in reverse-ENDIAN order from the x86 arictecture, and to my knowledge, the x86 cannot switch order on the fly, I believe...
Such an emulator would necessarily be dog-slow compared to the real thing.
Keep in mind that this is only a constant cost, and only for reads and writes to things outside the processor (most commonly RAM). Once a value is in a register, you can leave it in the host endianness. Certainly there is a speed hit for every access, but you take a bigger hit in other things. For example: emulating the MMU, doing the math for every virtual memory access. Maybe you could leverage the host MMU for this in some way, but then good luck writing emulator code portable across architectures.
I picked up an IBM RS/6000 PREP box (a model 7248) at auction about a year and a half ago. It was a nice desktop box, with PCI and ISA slots, integrated S3 video and ethernet, and used PS/2 mouse and keyboard, standard VGA, etc. It was essentially a PC with a PowerPC processor. These boxes are fairly common and easily obtained at low cost on eBay (I paid $15 for mine at auction). PREP stands for PowerPC REference Platoform, and yes, it was capable of running NT, AIX, Linux, and NetBSD. I ran all four of them at various times while fooling with it, then installed AIX on it and sold it on eBay a few months ago.
It wasn't an ATX footprint motherboard, but about the same size and dimension, in a nice PS/2-ish IBM case.
If you want to experiment with hardware like this, search eBay for RS/6000. The 7248 boxes aren't rip-roaring speedy but they're nice enough for what you'll pay (under $50).
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To handle this, Mac OS has generally included a "ROM" file which contained the part of Mac OS that had previously been stored on the ROM.
Mac OS and Mac OS X does do some checks before allowing itself to be installed on a machine, making sure it really is being installed on a Mac. I believe though that all it does ultimately is query OpenFirmware.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
My first thought is that this is nothing but a bunch of marketing BS, no substance at all.
Seriously, read the article, just what is IBM opening up? Answer: nothing that everyone else isn't already opening up.
The instruction set is still controlled by IBM, and while you are free to make your own PPC chips, it's not like that's anything new. Everyone is free to make their own SPARC chips as well, and from the looks of things SPARC has fewer restrictions than what IBM is proposing.
IBM will still license you the core, but that's hardly any different from what a half-dozen other chip markets will do using a wide variety of architectures.
So what does this buy you over x86? It's not like the x86 architecture is somehow *closed*. The ISA is fully documented and there are at least 4 companies producing x86 processors at the moment, possibly more if you look at the embedded space.
To me it sounds like nothing but a bunch of marketing BS trying to jump on some sort of open source bandwagon.
Before people get too excited about this big "development", remember that SPARC was a completely open architecture since something like 1987. Sun and Fujitsu manufacture their chips independently, and there are free SPARC designs downloadable over the WWW. IIRC, the only licensing cost is if you want to use the "SPARC" logo for branding and marketing.
Check www.sparc.org for the rest.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
I'm glad to see that people think that desktops are the only computers that people use...
I come from the embedded world. I don't know any engineer who would put an x86 in anything. On the other hand, I have put PPC in a lot of places, and there has been a trenendous amount of work to make this a stable, robust platform.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
This highlights a fact that the previous poster missed. The architectures of the Pentium 4 and Itanium families are vastly different from the "x86 architecture" in the previous generations of chips. The x86 instruction set is there and the chip presents itself in a backwords compatible way to the system. The innards are vastly evolved, however. A similar analogy is the leap from the Pentium Pro/II/III architecture or K6 architecture to the Athlon architecture.
SPARC, MIPS, and PA-RISC have had relatively minor architecture changes over the same time period. The IBM Power chips have had much better evolutionary gains.
The Chipset and CPU's were under the Telecom Divisions where they are used to very high margins and close to Zero price-elasticity as the equipments goes into areas where performance and reliability is paramount. (What does an extra $200 / CPU add to a $100K switch.
The price for an IBM Northbridge in 1K is around $85 compare this to Itnel Chipset that can be had for $9+-. The PowerPC itself was for a long time only available using Bumpchip technology maning you needed a very expensive socket or had to solder the cpu to the board.
In summary IBM and Moto was not interested in initial low volume low profit market.
Compare this to TI where you can buy DSP's in small quantities for almost the same as 100K price. TI understand they market needs to be developed and the pricing strategy needs to make the innovators job doable.
Help fight continental drift.
Interestingly, there are ways ways to install OS X on unsupported machines. Granted, these are simply legacy Mac's but perhaps with more tweaking one could eventually install OS X on those killer dual 1.4GHz G5 prototypes from Momentum Computing.
The SPARC is already an open architecture processor. It's been that way for years. Sun was the big player behind it, and certainly the best known, but the SPARC design is the closest thing there is to an "open source cpu." There's even a non-Sun organization (SPARC International) they spun off to act as a steward for the standard.
SPARC processors are made by Sun, Texas Instruments, Hitachi, and others. There's a history of all the chips made on their web site.
Dunno why they're too blind to see that this would be as good an idea for Java.
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Right on. I've tried getting hold of PPC gear, and nobody I've talked to locally will even bother to sell it to me. You can get "development kits" from manufactures for embedded stuff if you're prepared to pay $5000 or so for 6 year old technology. I think there's a couple of $1000 PPC boards targeted at AmigaOS and Linux too, but I've never even seen a 3rd party verify they even work worth a damn.
There was a northbridge company (MAI?) that held promise to bring boards to the masses but that idea seems to have fizzled too, with their "evaluation" boards costing $3900 for 1. Nobody seem to be serious about volume sales, and setting a realistic market price for what is essentially a slow-ass PC platform. It's always developer or evaluation or sample product.
These days I don't really give a damn. x86 works fine for me, and I can get low power x86 stuff like Mini/Nano-ITX cheaply too. Any advantage of PPC is lost on me these days. PowerPC is nice, but they missed the boat. IMO, going "Open" isn't enough for IBM to reach even the geek masses. They need salable product on the shelf (or website) and they need it to be competitively priced. Anything less is just cheap talk.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
No, its most certainly is not. Sparc is not open, you cannot get documentation on it without signing an NDA. Just because other companies who have been forced to sign NDAs can make sparc chips, doesn't make sparc open. And what does DB2 or AIX have to do with anything? When did I say IBM was open? I said open is a buzzword and IBM has been taking advantage of that fact lately.