The POWER and PowerPC General Discussion / News Thread

it should work but perhaps too much of a potato to be useful for anything - too little RAM particularly…

Well foxlet got it running so

More Raptor/POWER9 news

Ultravisor state added in DD2.3 stepping

From their wiki, RCS Wiki, I had heard about the ultravisor state before, but it sounded like it was only going to ship with POWER10. It seems bizzare that adding an additional privilege level would not even change the major version number of the stepping.

Edit: by the time I posted this, the 4 and 8-core DD2.3 Sforza chips are already listed on Raptor’s product page, branded as “POWER9 v2”. The 4-core DD2.3 is ~1.2 times the cost of the DD2.2, and the 8-core is ~1.125 times. So marked up by a fifth or an eighth of DD2.2.

Here’s my quick reference table, prices as of 2019-11-07 (like @oldellian, I too like looking at the per-core cost):

Talos II officially certified as RYF by FSF

https://www.fsf.org/news/talos-ii-mainboard-and-talos-ii-lite-mainboard-now-fsf-certified-to-respect-your-freedom

The Talos II boards are now officially certified as Respects Your Freedom (RYF) by the Free Software Foundation. While there are many who care little about this sort of thing, I imagine the percentage of people willing to pay for a Talos board is much higher among those who are curious about the FSF’s activities.

A certification cannot really hurt, though I would be curious just how thoroughly FSF audits such things. I imagine anyone actively and significantly repulsed by FSF’s stamp of approval was probably not willing to purchase to begin with.

RCS Forum

Raptor now has a forum of their own,
https://forums.raptorcs.com/

The software they are using is Simple Machines Forum (SMF); they mentioned on Twitter the impediments to using Discourse on Power architecture:

Not vBulletin, auto traysh /s

I came across a video about an IBM storage appliance/component for their Z mainframes that uses POWER9 chips. I also remember reading that for the E980 systems, there is a separate management box (HMC) that is also running on POWER9, although the predecessor (E880) used x86.

It makes me wonder how IBM internally thinks about and uses these chips. In a consumer setting, you usually have only one large x86 processor with everything else (trackpad, mouse, router, hard drive, etc.) using low power ARM or MIPS chips. It is a bit jarring to see IBM taking a proper server CPU and just using it to run storage interfaces or management boxes. Is that overkill, or do I just not have a good sense of scale for this?

The storage machine could make sense, if z14 mainframes really are spitting out constant I/O requests (I remember when Timothy Pearson had that talk with @wendell he mentioned POWER9 being notably good at high load) but the Hardware Management Controller seems strange. The IBM Systems Magazine site I linked does mention customers wanting to move away from Lenovo x86 HMCs for security reasons (Lenovo is a PRC company) so changing to an in-house CPU makes sense, but do you really need that much computing power for a hardware management device? If the x86 CPU was something specifically fabbed for low power, even if for enterprise customers the added CPU cost is relatively minimal, would not power consumption be an issue?

I’m going to start working on my youtube channel again. However, all my hardware is garbo for rendering video. I could do it on the laptop I’m recording from, but only 500GB of space. Had a hard drive, its connecting cable died, and I’m not waiting 2 weeks just to have more processor oomph.

I’m about to crack my Gen 2 PS3 and get linux on it. Would there be a way for me to edit everything in FCX or KDL and then dump it out to FFMPEG on my PS3? Or at least… a PS3? Doesn’t have to be the gen 2 I have because of the early faults in the chip.

@THEkitchenSINK Have you done any FFMPEG tests on your quad yet?

I have but need more time to test as I’m getting ram and fiber set up for the file storage

lmk i still need to do tests yet

If a PS3 is running linux as a base OS, do I have to install the nvidia 304 drivers to use the 7800GT?

That would legit suck if true.

Nvidia drivers aren’t available for PPC64 (big endian), you’re stuck with nouveau.

yaaaay

So Void’s binary repos are now complete for little endian ppc64 (both glibc and musl). I guess that’s one milestone out of the way, now the rest of the repos need building (64-bit BE and 32-bit), there’s about a third left to do.

Among other news, we’re the first ppc64le distro to support AMD Navi GPUs (thanks to backported display engine patches from drm-next-5.5 into our 5.4 stable/LTS kernel)

Heckin yeet.

Now also complete on big endian/32-bit: https://repo.voidlinux-ppc.org/stats.html

total count ~100k packages at just under 450GB.

HHEHHEHE got the GigaAccel 180 fixstars working
i killed by 6600 tho FUN guess the fiber card is to be removed
the max wattage on the pcie power port on the g5 quad is 300 watts im pushing like 270 with both cards the gigaaccel and the 4500fx

image.jpg2048×1152 968 KB

What is a gigaaccel good for?

so far render and ffmpeg are the want but im still far out from that
remember the ps3 airforce supercomputer this is basically what a eol ps3 was 8 spe 1 ppe like the gigaaccel and not the 7 spe 1 ppe of the ps3’s that could use other os. the ps3 cell/be processor is still better then most intel cpus today for render (8 core with ht). the fact i can run (once i have a os on the card) almost the same software a ps3 can means i might be able to pull of a really good ps3 emu. this is still be fucking around so none of this is 100% until i can confirm and as i can see none of this has been done on consumer/prosumer hardware as of late mostly fixstars powerstations and some ibm pxcab/q21s hardware.

im compiling the information and creating a back up of all cell/be sdk and software made for the cell architecture. even tho ibm killed cell it still has relevant information for the ppc community.

my main goal is to use the GigaAccel 180 for a test ground for some ppc software i cannot get running on my g5 quad

Is it good for h265 encoding?

The PS3 cell/be supports it … I haven’t seen anyone do it though and or find posts of much of the render work done by others. Once I can test I will get back to you on this.