Since POWER9 and OpenSPARC are open architectures with open ISAs, I don't see why companies like Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba aren't using them and trying instead to build CPUs based on ARM. Is there a much better performance/power ration which can be achieved by ARM and not by POWER or SPARC?
An ISA is like a platform.
It is valuable only if it has many users, e.g., application code, optimized for the ISA.
HW's job is to then run that code with good perf/cost.
OpenPOWER has little software. ARM has a lot of software.
So from that POV, ARM is already many orders of magnitude more valuable than OpenPOWER.
But it doesn't end there. Do you need some software to be extremely optimized for ARM? ARM can do this for you at resonable price, no need to hire.
Also, for OpenPOWER, you need to hire 50-100 Facebook engineers, at 400k$/year, and it'll take them >3 years to produce a chip design, which then needs to be verified, etc. and then needs to be built, so you'll need a fab, specialized on OpenPOWER, or not. A fab churns 40k chips/month, so how many chips / month do these companies need ?
With ARM, you pick one of the many ARM farms, and there is little for you to do. And you get 5 engineers, and they just customize an ARM design to your needs. And they ship in 1 year instead of 3. And next year ARM gives you a way to update your chip to the next generation. And if next year you need some other feature, ARM gives it to you. And if you need software, like C library, profilers, math, all that is supplied by Arm.
And they take royalties on chips you built, and.... and....
So ARM is many orders of magnitude cheaper in perf / $ than OpenPower. Not only is the hardware better, but it is better, cheaper, has more software, and tools, and teams of experts ready to help your team, etc.
Is ISA lock-in really an issue today?
Porting most software to ARM64, Power, or RISC-V involves typing some variation of "make." Only a small percentage of software written in C/C++ or ASM is problematic. Anything in a higher level language like Go or a newer language like Rust is generally 100% portable.
Switching from X86_64 to ARM64 (M1) for my desktop dev system was trivial.
Endian-ness used to bite, but today virtually everything is little-endian above embedded. Power and some ARM support both modes but almost always run in little-endian mode (e.g. ppc64le).
- Have you ever, e.g., computed the sinus of a floating point number in C (sinf) ?
- Have you ever multiplied a matrix with a vector, or a matrix with a matrix (GEMM) using BLAS?
- Have you ever done an FFT ?
- Have you used C++ barriers? Or pthreads? Or mutexes?
An optimized implementation achieves ~100% of theoretical peak performance of a CPU on all of those, and these are all tailored to each CPU model.
There is software on any running system doing those things all the time. Running at 0% of the peak just means increased power consumption, latency, time to finish, etc.
Generic versions perform at < 100%, often at ~0% (0.1%, 0.001%, etc.) of theoretical peak.
Somebody has to write software for doing this things for the actual hardware, so that you can then call them from python.
IBM has dozens of "open source" bounties open for PowerPC, and they pay real $$$, but nobody implements them.
---
Porting software to PowerPC is only as simple as doing make if the libraries your software uses (the C standard library, the libm library, BLAS, etc. ) all have optimized implementations, which isn't the case.
So when considering PowerPC, you have to divide the paper numbers by 100 if you want to get the actual numbers normal code recompiled with make gets in practice. And then you have to invest extra $$$ into improving that software, cause nobody will do it for you.
Endianess is not the only problem. You can have issues with different cache coherency model, different alignment requirements, different syscalls (which are partially arch-dependent, at least on Linux). The fact that the switch from x86 to arm was trivial just proves the point that arm has matured really well.
You think Firefox ported their jit to power simply by typing make?
>OpenPOWER has little software. ARM has a lot of software.
Most Linux software has being ported over.
Works is step 0.
Works efficiently is step 10000.
x86 is at step 10000, ARM at step 5000, power is at step 0.
Firefox "worked" before this post on power. Now somebody put enough effort to actually make it usable.
The fact that you don't see people complaining about Firefox PowerPC performance on Linux is not because performance was good - it was unusably slow - but because nobody uses Firefox on Power.
Think about what that means. Think about how many bugs in Firefox are reported _every day_ for x86 and ARM, and how many are reported for PowerPC. Is that also because the PowerPC version has no bugs? (no, it is because nobody uses it, nobody reports them, and nobody fixes them).
Prior to this work, Firefox was also ported in the sense that it ran but it was much slower because it had not been optimized. How much of the software which has been compiled for Power has been well-tested, much less optimized?
Most Linux software doesn't need porting at all - just recompiling.
The instruction set is not as critical as you might think, and ARM has the huge advantage of a lot of working implementations which you can already buy.
Semiconductor design teams don't exactly grow on trees, either. It was over a decade from Apple buying PA Semi whole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi ) to announcing the M1.
And of course if you're going to do that you already need the rest of the vertically integrated pipeline to build motherboards to put your chips on, peripheral IP to do all the other things other than processing, etc.
ARM also has lots of sometimes hand-optimized software that may not be available or as good as for those other platforms.
I havenāt checked, but I donāt expect Power to have good USB support, for example.
I also think Power targets a different performance range than ARM.
Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSPARC and https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-overvi..., both of which mention no news after 2008, OpenSPARC looks on its deathbed to me.
I would think USB would be more of a OS issue, though. If a USB driver came as a blob, my Talos II obviously couldn't run it, but otherwise pretty much all USB stuff just works if I have source code for it (Fedora). Page size can ruin your day for some devices -- I have to hack FireWire, for example, because it assumes a 4K page size and Fedora uses 64K pages -- but so far no issues with USB or AMD GPUs.
Optimization is a bigger issue, though autovectorization in compilers is making it less of a problem than it used to be, as well as us nerd pioneers getting things upstreamed.
Quite. I can't think of any reason other than retrocomputing that someone would want an OpenSPARC.
I think people forget that the economies are different with hardware vs software; because you cannot eradicate the per-unit cost of hardware, paying a small part of that in license fees is not a big deal, especially since it comes with integration support that saves you a lot of non-recurring R&D expense. Whereas in software, being free makes it zero-friction and this has a huge impact on adoption.
Linux and BSD drivers are multiplatform by design. They work on PPC, Intel, ARM, and RISC-V.
https://libre-soc.org/ is perhaps interesting in the POWER space.
We can't buy Cortex/Neoverse equivalent modern core design on POWER/SPARC
As others have already said, ARM has the economy of scale which POWER doesn't have. And SPARC seems to be dead.
Also, ARM has always (?) been about getting the most out of limited resources, whereas POWER is about performance at any cost. With modern ARM designs, the performance is getting close to, and even exceeding, that of traditional desktop and server CPUs, while still being frugal with resources. POWER is still, well, power-hungry.
Agreed. Power frugality is absolutely crucial, especially at larger, enterprise scale. Unless you're in HPC, you're looking for a good balance of peak performance-per-watt and the lowest idle consumption, with a very good scaling down story. ARM has long done a better job of this than x86. It's one of the main reasons the chipset has been absolutely dominant in the smartphone market.
The biggest single cost for AWS etc. is per-rack running costs, encompassing power, cooling etc. It's hard to overemphasise just how much this dwarfs all other costs. To optimise those costs you've got to cut down the power consumption and associated heat production.
This is very exciting. The missing JIT has made web browsing much less pleasant than it should be and is currently the the only significant issue I have with my POWER9 workstation.
Hey, thanks!
What's the context for this? Is there a new JIT compiler for Javascript in Firefox? Or is it a 3rd-party "add-on" that improves performance on some specific machine that this company makes?
It's JIT support for the OpenPOWER architecture, which is interesting, but as far as I can tell isn't exactly in wide use right now. At least not where you might need Firefox. https://openpowerfoundation.org/
EDITED: derp, confused: There are POWER Workstations from Raptor Computing Systems (https://www.raptorcs.com/). Talospace are POWER enthusiasts. Thanks amock for the correction.
The man behind talospace.com doesn't make workstations, he has one from https://raptorcs.com/. He's a PowerPC enthusiast.
How do POWER CPUs compare with ARM, x86, etc?
Isn't a better allocation of scarce engineering resources on the POWER platform to implement a RDP client to x86 commodity desktop environment for the commercial consumer experience on the web with the benefit of offsetting and isolating potential security breach to that environment? Has anyone made the POWER CPU a raw node for crunching styled on the Plan 9 idea of cpu% ?
I'm missing a lot of context. Can someone explain why POWER9 is interesting?
Is OpenPOWER trying to compete with RISC-V? Whats the benefit compared to modern ARM or x86_64 silicon & ISAs?
POWER9 is interesting (compared to RISC-V) because, right now, you can buy up to a 24 core, SMT4 system (96 threads), running dual CPU sockets if you like, and supporting up to 1 TB of memory per socket, with a maximum boosted clock speed of 3.8 GHz.
All this with fully open firmware, and an open ISA (as of the last couple years). The CPU implementation itself is not open, but all firmware and procedures for initializing the CPU are open. For people interested in that sort of thing, it's appealing as a practical computer with a full PCIe implementation with actually decent performance, compared to essentially every other open source platform.
It is interesting as Raptor is one of the few production ready commercial computing hardware providers that offers full source code of its firmware.
> Can someone explain why POWER9 is interesting
From my point of view it is interesting because it provides an alternative to x86 and ARM. The more competition, the better. Competition will push the hardware forward. Imagine we only had only one CPU architecture and one CPU maker.
We have far less CPU architectures than we used to have.
It's trying to compete with x86.
Likewise. I can tell the author is excited about it, but I don't have enough domain knowledge to understand the context. Is this a WASM extension?
The first thing to know is there's a community of people using POWER9 workstations, whether for actual "work" or just as personal computers for, well, personal use. In both cases, web browsers are very important.
These devices support basically all the DRM GPU drivers in Linux, and when coupled with Mesa, have very fast and responsive GUIs. Both Firefox and Chromium run well, but up until now, Firefox has been using a pure interpreter to run javascript. This is fine for sites not using much javascript, but a big chunk of the modern web quite literally loads megabytes worth of JS on a page, and it can really chug under the interpreter.
So it's pretty exciting that we'll have a second browser with a proper JS engine, Chromium being the first (IBM ported V8 to ppc64le, for node.js, but the port works for running chromium as well)
Also because it may not be clear, the other big arches all already have JIT compilers. x86, amd64, 32 and 64 bit ARM, (and I think MIPS does, on either chromium or firefox, don't recall), so this is less about boosting performance, and more about reaching "baseline expected performance".
MIPS has a JIT on both, though it's mipsle, not "classic" BE MIPS like sgimips. It's more targeted to CPUs like Loongson.
Anyway, I'm trying to go as fast as I can to get an actual browser mounted. But passing the test suites in totality, run two different ways, suggests a high probability of success at this point.
Great work, but since
(A) at the very least my every attempt to buy a POWER9 system has been thwarted, mainly by the manufacturer themselves constraining availability or otherwise being unable to supply, and
(B) POWER10 has IP issues that have made it unattractive to Raptor CS, and
(C) they have in the past made noises about it not being worth the effort to continue to sell POWER9 systems to the public because of the support overhead
...I have to ask if this is effort well-spent, or if the sweat would be better poured into something with a more certain future.
Not that RISC-V boards currently are anywhere near fast enough for daily driver use, but I'm leaning in that direction.
Author here. For me it's well spent, since this is my daily desktop driver. I can't comment on (C) or (A), though I agree (B) is a problem. But while RISC-V has a "future" (or at least a more distributed one) I see no system currently or in the near future that's anywhere in the same performance ballpark. The architecture has a lot of potential but it feels to me like it remains unrealized. OpenPOWER exists today in competitive specifications and notwithstanding supply chain issues, you can get one (I have three).
What are the IP issues related to POWER10? I hadn't heard about it.
The memory controllers required by OMI and one of the on-chip I/O processors (possibly for PCIe). Both are only available as blobs: https://www.talospace.com/2021/09/its-not-just-omi-thats-tro...
Is there a surplus/used market where one can buy a talos II for a better price?
Between the various keywords in the title and the domain, it took me about a minute and a resigned click to figure out whether this was about browsers or rockets
Anyone want to Hollywood movie, āin English pleaseā this for me? If it is at the top of HN I feel like I should understand the significance more.
POWER9 is a family of processors. This is an announcement that Firefox's coding engine (for JavaScript) can run this code fast on those processors. It's somewhat interesting because OPENPOWER is a competitive alternative to Intel/AMD's processor architecture, and also ARM (used mostly in mobile.)
It makes JavaScript in Firefox running on IBM POWER9'S CPUs faster.
Intel just got BTFO.
My Quad G5 can't wait to take a ride :)
Get a daily email with the the top stories from Hacker News. No spam, unsubscribe at any time.