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Comment by justinjlynn | Hacker News Reader

> On the other hand, this seems like a sad and humiliating end to a once-proud processor family. It’s as if the Rothschilds or Rockefellers went begging on the street. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Wow. Why is it that when someone is confident in something and chooses to donate it to the people in the face of a changing market people treat them as if they've failed? This is a massive success and a new beginning - they've taken a closed system they've been working on for decades and opened it up - we should be applauding this action, not denigrating the effort.

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> “The future has never looked brighter for the Power architecture,” says Hugh Blemings, Executive Director of the OpenPower Foundation, apparently with a straight face. You don’t drop your price to zero when business is good. Still, the move probably is a good one for Power as an architecture. And a good one for designers the world over, now that they have a major new choice to consider.

> Your very own IBM computer. Who would’ve thought it?

I'm stunned. Who would write something as smugly as this is written... and why?

You don't reduce the price to zero when business is good, no. IBM isn't. They're reducing the price to zero for the parts of their product to which business is now irrelevant and for which free and open collaboration is now more valuable than secrecy and proprietary ownership - and good on them for it. They still charge lots of dollars for their support, their processors and their implementations based on them - and stand to benefit massively from opening the ISA and surrounding infrastructure and patents.

Do yourself a favour and don't write like the article's author does - if you do, it'll just make you sound like an ass.

Just because the architecture is free doesn't mean IBM won't make a shitload of money from the future of this processor. There are a lot of other ways than licensing. RHEL is free since forever and still it's the biggest income source for Red Hat afaik.

Um, yes, that's basically what I said, or rather, what I meant to say - if it wasn't clear.

It was clear

Just longer

RHEL is free? I am missing something? I believe it's free only for developers and for development purposes.

Even the desktop "self-supported" version was something like $90 last time I checked.

CentOS/Scientific Linux is not RHEL.

The subscription is not free of charge, the software is free of charge. If you buy a subscription and don't extend it or copy my filesystem you can use it without problems. You just won't receive official updates or official support.

Free as in Open Source.

However, it's important to note that although the sources for RHEL packages are available as open-source, that still doesn't make CentOS an exact replica of RHEL, and therefore doesn't make RHEL itself "free".

RHEL 8 was released almost 4 months ago and there's no CentOS 8 yet. Mainly because taking the "free" RHEL sources and rebuild them isn't a simple case of removing logos and other "non-free" material. The build process itself (the sequence in which packages must be built so that all of them build successfully and with equivalent functionality to RHEL) is a major piece of what makes RHEL, RHEL, and that isn't free (or even publicly available).

Free as in Freedom to download CentOS

no really free as in free beer

> They're reducing the price to zero for the parts of their product to which business is now irrelevant and for which free and open collaboration is now more valuable than secrecy and proprietary ownership - and good on them for it.

And possibly bad for them. See Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement [1], by Gwern.

> Joel Spolsky in 2002 identified ... the pattern of “"commoditizing your complement"”, an alternative to vertical integration, where companies seek to secure a chokepoint or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers by dominating one layer while fostering so much competition in another layer above or below its layer that no competing monopolist can emerge, prices are driven down to marginal costs elsewhere in the stack, total price drops & increases demand, and the majority of the consumer surplus of the final product can be diverted to the quasi-monopolist.

This move is good for IBM. Not clear what the repercussions will be for other players - even open source developers.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement

Because it was literally failing in the market. IBM PAID global foundries $1.5 BILLION to take the chip business from them. Now they're giving away the IP in hopes that someone will actually start making chips from it to drive demand for Redhat. If you think Power was a massive success you must be waiting on the edge of your seat for Itanium to finally reach global dominance too.

https://www.bizjournals.com/albany/morning_call/2015/01/anal...

And they got the highest performance 14nm FinFET process on the market for P9 and z14 while clearing the way to compete against fabless AMD and ARM vendors with P10. If anything, intel looks stupid here after falling behind in fab tech and causing immense turmoil for their external fab customers.

A trivial review of IBM's systems revenue versus the datacenter breakout of any other CPU maker earnings reports will net you: yes, it is indeed quite successful.

No way. 3x performance for 5x the cost doesn’t add up. IBM juices the data center systems metrics with their cross-selling strategy. You need to look at the deals, they give away stuff like storage or even software.

IBM was brilliant in how it rolled up the mainframe/old school Unix/AS400 business on the hardware side. But that playbook was based on big traditional companies and leveraging the base and relationships... there’s a reason that AIX essentially is the last proprietary Unix. But every EA renewal cycle Microsoft is shipping some Azure, some department is buying a SaaS platform, old school IT directors are retiring, etc. It’s a slowly dying business and has been for a long time.

Intel has its own problems, but they are a different category of problem. Even then, we have multiple suppliers, and Intels struggles ultimately help the x64 platform.

> No way. 3x performance for 5x the cost doesn’t add up.

Performance and price never had a linear relationship. Past a certain point each "unit" of performance costs substantially more than the previous. Think 80-20 rule.

This is true, but with modern applications, it tends to be more economical to scale out vs up.

If you're running a big implementation of software that scales up or has licensing rules that make scale-out expensive (ie. Oracle), Power is a no-brainer. Problem is that generally speaking, the industry had gone a different path.

As always this is a "right tool for the job" discussion. There's no silver bullet. But the fact that price rises faster than performance the closer you are to peak performance doesn't say anything about the value of the product. The problem is usually when you can no longer scale out. You'll see the same with storage, GPU, RAM, etc.

Because Power is on such a slow (and getting slower) cycle, it seems like the best case for Power10 is for it to be ahead of Epyc for one year then be behind for 4-5 years. And the worst case is that Power10 will already be behind Epyc when it is released.

Revenue is a different story that doesn't necessarily reflect technical merit.

> Power is on such a slow (and getting slower) cycle...

so, how are we judging cycles here? I seriously doubt Intel and AMD use the same definition that IBM do.

Let's just say between IBM's cycles:

- new PCI Express subsystem revision (first to market with PCI Express 4.0 in P9... who knows with P10)

- new memory interface architecture (Centaur and DDR4 direct attach w/ P9 and now OMI with P10)

- new coherent processor external accelerator bus (OpenCAPI and CAPI...)

- new internal interrupt accelerator function architecutre (XIVE w/ P9)

- new privilege level for hypervisor/guest separation (Ultravisor/PEF in P9+/P10)

... and so on.

Intel and AMD do NOT do that. Let's compare apples and apples here instead of using ill-defined words like 'cycles'.

Looking at the roadmap, IBM released nothing in 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2019. The number of cores has been stagnant from 2014 to 2020.

It's nice that, with the ISA being open, now IBM won't need to compete with commodity chip maker pressures and niche providers can make directly compatible chips on a regular schedule which suits their niches best.

As for the number of cores, memory bandwidth needs to keep those cores fed and now we're just seeing real memory bandwidth improvements - the number of cores and threads is expected to increase commensurately with that in the next revisions of the micro-architecture.

Shipping excellent, up to date, and competitive processors is more than just releasing a moderately tweaked, more tightly binned SKU every 6 months.

> IBM released nothing in

Neither AMD nor Intel shine though, if they were the target of the comparison. For the past 5+ years Intel more or less released slightly tweaked versions of the same CPUs and all those tiny bumps were just wiped out anyway so we can basically just count on marginal power improvements. And up until Zen in 2017 AMD had practically been a no-show for 6 years.

I didn't say it was a massive success - but it still did pretty darn well against the x86 juggernaut; and now it's doing something that juggernaut can never do, going open. This will enable so many application tailored designs that IBM itself could never do viably. We'll see how things go - I don't make predictions, but I do have hope for a more open, more hacker friendly future.

  something that (x86) juggernaut can never do, going open

Why do you think that? Sure there is some level of cross license/etc, but x86's have been designed/built by a number of 3rd party companies (IDT, rise, cyrix, transmeta, etc) in the past, and basic versions that skip over the currently IP protected bits could probably be done again. x86-64 is nearly 20 years old at this point so patents there will start to expire soon.

You're right. I shouldn't say never. It might, one day, be able to do it - and I hope it does; but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting. The fact that no unified entity owns x86 or it's multitudinous extensions makes going open almost impossible - so, so many independent interests and conflicting businesses would need to align.

Beyond that, IBM uses it for several of their mainframe products too.

This is false, the zXX microprocessors are custom cores that natively run the z/Architecture ISA. Even a trivial comparison will show they are different and not just a microcode layer running on a POWER processor. There is probably some level of sharing (say a high perf divide unit or whatever) but that doesn't make them the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_z14_(microprocessor)

Edit, Adding some microarch descriptions links below:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11750/hot-chips-ibms-next-gen...

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/ibm/microarchitectures/power9

They are custom cores, but they likely do share at least some RTL - we won't know, of course, unless IBM decide to share those details and I doubt they would.

ISTR reading somewhere they're used in the I/O hardware (OSA etc)?

Yah, there are embedded power processors scattered all over IBM's hardware lines. The z tape controller a couple years ago was just a rack mount POWER server. OTOH, so is x86, the z's HMC, PE's etc are just x86 laptops/servers.

But thats like calling an x86 server an ARM because there are ARM's in the disk controllers, and on the motherboard acting as BMC's/etc.

And mainframes rely on them extensively. Pretty much everything that can be delegated is, leaving the z cores running as little code as possible.

Agreed. I just read "...uses it..." to include things other than the main processors.

(edit: misquote)

Their other mainframe product the iSeries is POWER-based. We just bought a new one and it has a POWER 9 CPU.

iseries is not a mainframe (and you will never hear an IBMer make that mistake). That's whats traditionally called a minicomputer. Sure they make some big ones, but people don't go around calling a superdome flex a mainframe either despite it being a massive machine (something like 1k cores and 48TB of ram in its max config). Its just a fancy x86.

> Now they're giving away the IP in hopes that someone will actually start making chips from it to drive demand for Redhat.

And probably it'll be RISC-V at the end of the day anyway, and it'll sell Redhat just fine. ;- )

Agreed! An open processor architecture has strictly greater value to me than a proprietary one. x86 is only a good option today because competitors have been allowed to implement it (and often better than Intel). The opening of PowerPC is great news, and hopefully not the "end" of anything.

I don't know where this idea comes from that open-sourcing a platform is a step down. Had Linux started out closed-source and then gone open-source, I think it would be clear to everyone (knowing what we know today) that this would be a huge benefit to all. Same with Javascript, or the JVM, or CLR, or any other platform. Open platforms at any level have more value, full stop.

Is keeping an ISA proprietary of real value to anyone these days? The cost of entry is still high enough that you're not going to be threatened by J Random Hacker. We can already see this. ARM is available for people to license, and TSMC will fab chips for you, yet Apple's CPU division doesn't seem to be seriously threatened by anyone.

And think about what fully opening up POWER like this begins to enable!

IBM has poured a ton of money into having roughly the same ecosystem for POWER as x86: nearly every major Linux distribution ships ppc64le ports [0] (most at full parity to their x86 server release--including testing and building on the platform itself), there's several places to get access to it (even for free as I mentioned on a previous thread [1,2]), and several FPGAs, GPUs, and other accelerator cards work with it [3,4].

Going past x86 (and competing with RISC-V and others), there's a freely available softcore (as I mentioned elsewhere) [5]. And since IBM open sourced the latest ISA with a full, modern instruction set (AES, SHA, Vectors...) -- the community around a softore could eventually go and implement it [6]. And as Talos has shown, even most of the microcode is open source or at least publicly verifiable.

Once the community forms around it, what do you have? [7]

A starting point for all sorts of new projects. Someone else has done nearly all of the work to build something amazingly complex (from hardware gates to a working NodeJS/Go/$LANG stack): all you need to do is tailor this to what you need.

Want to optimize to your specific workload? Grab the softcore, pull out the portions you don't need, deploy/test on a FPGA, and run Linux over the top with a full suite of debugging tools already available.

Want to experiment with new instructions not currently available? Grab a softcore, implement your new instructions, add compiler support or assembly support, and iterate.

Want a low-power core for an IOT device? You could license ARM or you could build on a free POWER softcore.

Want tons of scalar cores for a massively parallel problem? Write it in C, compile to ppc64le, and deploy on many instances of the same softcore running on a FPGA.

None of this is possible with x86 or RISC-V today. If it is, the overhead, time, expertise, and cost makes it exclusive to only large companies and research institutions. IBM has done most of the work to commoditize this. Costs to fab will remain high but deploying on a FPGA would at least tell you if your approach is viable and something you could consider.

Yeah, Intel or AMD could eventually open source this much too. But they'd have to start having conversations with their lawyers... And then with all their partners... And then eventually they'd get to where POWER is today... :)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20752226

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20749369

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20751639

[3]: https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/12/15/nvlink-shines-power9...

[4]: https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-p9dsu-c-based-ibm-po...

[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20826081

[6]: Yeah, there's admittedly a lot of work to go from "scalar softcore" to "100% ISA implementation". But if IBM does things correctly and tries to build a community, especially of academic researchers, around the softcore... It could go somewhere.

[7]: Ok, I guess this is an if... :)

> And as Talos has shown, even most of the microcode is open source or at least publicly verifiable.

All of the microcode and firmware is fully verifiable and owner buildable/modifiable. Even the secure boot root trust keys are publicly known and can be personalised with your own key with, of course, the well-known key distrusted. AFAIK, the only thing that isn't owner modifiable (or modifiable by anyone else really), besides the silicon, is the one-time programmable ROM which the processor bootstraps from on power-on is publicly verifiable w/ assembler source code. Datasheets and programming information is available for almost every single chip on the board - as are schematics (woohoo! I've already used them to make repairs a few times). As of right now, the only blob required, on the stock system, is related to the broadcom network chip firmware - and that's been fully reverse engineered and a beta version of the firmware which is clean room open source is now available (project ortega).

It's the most open and hacker-friendly system I've ever owned and I really wouldn't want to have to go back to something less.

>Want a low-power core for an IOT device? You could license ARM or you could build on a free POWER softcore.

To be fair, there's a bunch of small, decent quality, open source RISC-V cores that have gone to tape-out (RI5CY, Ibex, PicoRV32, SweRV)

Yeah, perhaps fully-auditable core would've been a better example. One that runs a full Linux stack for a mainstream distro.

I'm personally most interesting in profiling and tuning to my workload to run on FPGAs. But that's many years out. :)

> roughly the same ecosystem for POWER as x86

Can a solo developer rent a cloud VM running POWER at a reasonable price yet?

Yes! Free if you're working on an open source project (check out Oregon State University's Open Source Lab's POWER offerings: VMs (+/- GPUs) and Jenkins integrations). That's what I use.

If you're working on something commercial, you might check out http://integricloud.com/ -- looks like they start at start at $250/mo for a dedicated system (with 16-cores). If you check out their billing rates, it sounds like you can get a single core/thread though for about ~10-20 a month: http://integricloud.com/content/base/managevms.html?viewrate...

(I've never used integricloud but someone commented on my comment mentioning OSUOSL from a week ago)

If you don't mind it being served from Brazil, its actually free: http://openpower.ic.unicamp.br/minicloud/

> Had Linux started out closed-source and then gone open-source

It did. The original license didn't allow commercial use.

That's not closed-source. If anything, it's shared-source.

>Why is it that when someone is confident in something and chooses to donate it to the people in the face of a changing market people treat them as if they've failed?

It's because of past experience. FOSS Foundations are where code/specs are donated to die.

Not because FOSS can't create success stories, but because when a for profit company gives away proprietary specs/code as open source, it's because they see no further benefit from keeping it, and its already dying. And of course, it's precisely the company that employed people working on the thing, and who know it well - a community wont emerge from nothing.

There are counter-examples but few and far between.

Less check back on this "great future" in 5 years...

We probably need to actually look at what the newly open-sourced processor architecture looks like before making assumptions. Perhaps it’s got some amazing merit beyond x86, ARM, etc? Open sourcing it reveals something new and possibly better to the public.

Examine it first then make judgements on the product they are releasing not why they are doing it!

> We probably need to actually look at what the newly open-sourced processor architecture looks like before making assumptions. Perhaps it’s got some amazing merit beyond x86, ARM, etc? Open sourcing it reveals something new and possibly better to the public.

Did they release anything which wasn't publicly known before [1]? IBM "open sourced" the POWER ISA and gave patent cover, meaning they won't sue you if your create a POWER ISA compatible chip without paying them. But the ISA documentation was no secret before either; a secret ISA wouldn't be particularly useful after all.

[1] Yes, they released a microcontroller class softcore. Fine, but very far from POWER9.

There is a huge graveyard of projects that companies "donated" to the community. Think of Solaris operating system, Google Wave. Typically, I am not saying that this is IBM case, but typically it means that a given product does not bring much value for the company and usually this means that a given product does not have too much value at all.

Enterprises are rarely giving something away, they should earn money, so if they do this, it rises suspicion that there is a product that has no value and a company gives away something worthless only for the sake of PR.

Yup.

There are exceptions, though. Blender failed to make money for the studio that made it, resulting in them selling it to the community for a one-time fee, and it is now one of the great jewels of the open source movement: https://www.blender.org/foundation/history/

It's important to note, though, that in Blender's case the founder remained involved the whole way through, and I think still is. I suspect his dedication and long-term attention is a lot of why it worked out.

Firefox...

OpenSolaris is still alive via forks and parts of it are routinely distributed with Linux and BSDs. Solaris is still proprietary, of course, and is as niche as AIX.

What is concerning here is that opening SPARC did not create a vibrant ecosystem of SPARC parts and computers, which is a shame.

As I see, IBM has the high end well covered with POWER9 and 10 and I'm not sure the embedded PowerPC crowd is that interested in big brother's ISA.

The key difference can be that while SPARC was stagnant when it was opened, POWER is extremely successful (and took over much of what was previously owned by SPARC and HP)

> POWER is extremely successful

Compared to what? To the meteoric rise of x86 in the data center, and ARM in embedded, not enough it seems?

And yes, currently the two largest supercomputers (Sierra & Summit) are POWER machines, but 1) Most of the oomph in those come from the Nvidia GPU's not the POWER cpu's 2) IBM got none of the CORAL-2 systems, which makes people wonder whether they have given up on the HPC market.

If anything, it seems POWER is on a slow descent towards irrelevance. Considering the nice moves they have made wrt. openness (e.g. the Raptor machines with open firmware all the way down to the metal etc.), I hope I'm wrong and this move helps turn the ship around. We'll see I guess.

POWER belongs to a niche. It's in the very profitable scale-up segment, above the x86 space, where x86s don't reach without some custom chipsets. The high end "reasonable" x86 boxes compete with the low end POWER machines and, from then on, almost nothing competes with them (it's a narrowing niche, I must add, and Oracle doesn't seem very interested in it). If IBM wants POWER to expand, it must do so down towards Intel and AMD.

IIRC, the time Sierra and Summit got designed, POWER offered interconnects faster than anything available on x86, which was important to keep the GPUs in those systems busy. Different HPC systems have different needs and with the latest Xeon Scalable and AMD Rome that advantage may have evaporated a bit - and I'm not surprised IBM didn't win or even propose. Let's see what OpenCAPI and OMI bring to the table and if, with the good experiences with the Talos desktops as proof that the software ecosystem is there some foundry gets interested in something that could compete with lower end Xeon in the embedded space.

> It’s as if the Rothschilds or Rockefellers went begging on the street. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

A good thing to point out is that while I have a vague notion that Rotschilds are bankers, I have strictly no idea what business the Rockfellers were in. I only know them because of their charity efforts.

Giving back is not a defeat, it is the culmination of success.

Standard Oil. It's a bit long-winded, but I recently read and would recommend "Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.".

That you don't know what business Rockefeller was in would please him greatly beyond the grave. The man went to great lengths to obscure his business activities, and there was a concerted effort late in his life and by his descendants to ensure that people remembered the family for their charitable activities, and not the business activities that precipitated the largest anti-trust action in history.

>I have strictly no idea what business the Rockfellers were in

Standard Oil - ExxonMobil, Chevron Corp., and BP own big parts of that business now.

And lots of other ventures, mines, real estate (remember this Rockefeller Center thing, plus half of NY), etc.

Exactly. Comparing open source to begging on the street? Yeah, sure, pretty accurate comparison if you are living in a parallel universe where street beggars run the world's infrastructure.

Because if you remember the promise of the 615 in ‘93, and what could have been, it just seems sad.

For those not “in the know”, the PowerPC 615 was a never-released design that was pin-compatible with the Pentiums of the day and would have been able to run x86 and PowerPC (in both 32- and 64-bit variants).

I had no idea that existed. That would've been interesting. It'd be fun to see something like that in the future.

A lot of the engineers ended up at Transmeta.

I vaguely recall that it was a power hog.

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