If I bought this, I would use it as daily driver for productivity work plus some vintage gaming through emulation. So what would be very interesting on top of the everyday use element, is some emulation related tests. I would like to propose
The use of qemu or better yet hqemu user mode emulation together with binfmt and chroot to see if simple x86 Linux games run well at all. This was actually demoed by Raptor on a Power8 system before in 2016 when they were still contemplating the Talos 1.
If the above is workable then throw Wine on top of it and see how it does. Given the test done at Talospace on this topic, hqemu seems to emulate x86 at around 1/3 the speed? So letâs call it a 1ghz Pentium. So perhaps try games that date back to early 2000s?
The above at the end is emulation so may not work well. But how about vintage gaming through open source emulators like RPCS3, Dolphin and MAME? I wonder if those will compile and work correctly. If they do then it still provides a decent source of old games for leisure.
Away from emulation, I also wonder how well nVidia GPU works on this system. We know nVidia provides binary drivers for their Tesla cards to work on Power9 systems. I wonder if they would be nice enough to leave the codes in there so either GeForce or Quadro cards would work? The Tesla cards have no video output so âuselessâ as a display card.
If #4 doesnât work, would a Tesla card combined with an AMD GPU work, through the Looking Glass project? Itâs a big ask though if you have a Tesla card lying around, it might be worth a shot?
Those are my wish list items. Really appreciate your insights here.
If they were optimized/ported for Power, which they probably arenât at the moment, RPCS3 and Dolphin could actually end up running faster (potentially), since the PS3, Wii, and GameCube all used PowerPC CPUs. There are potentially some non-standard extensions to implement; for example, the Xbox 360 had increased SIMD with VMX128. Also for the PS3âs Cell, you still have to implement the SPU cores, but again, Iâd bet those are more similar to standard Power than x86-64.
@wendell I would like to know what is the efficiency of the SMT implementation. I know that they are offering SMT4 and SMT8 solutions. I donât know which one that you received. I know on the Intel platform, HT basically gives you 1.5 core performance per core. AMD is somewhere around that as well.
I know in the old ppc and power days, the SMT performance was closer to 2 core performance per core before SMT4+. I wonder what the performance is now. One of the reasons that power was âpowerâ hungry was because you had to run at full tilt to get the most performance and efficiency out of the platform. If SMT functions close to the core performance of the thread count, then it is a great time to be alive and we can finally see a shift to alternative architectures becoming mainstream again.
I really plan on picking up a lite to function as a network appliance and build server.
All of Raptorâs boards, Google/Rackspaceâs Zaius, and IBMâs AC922 (basically anything intended exclusively for Linux) use the SMT4 versions of POWER9.
The âmodulesâ, are more a description of the interposer/socket. AFAIK, all three of the chips described above are the same size silicon, but the module type determines what socket it will use and what IO is available:
Looks like I too had posted about this in the thread earlier.
I should note that the RCS Wiki isnât quite clear on module types being shared across chip types; but I asked Adi Gangidi about it on Twitter. I did link to that tweet earlier, but it is pretty interesting, so Iâll quote it here:
Let me comment on La Grange Power9 . ( Scale-out Datacenter caterer SKU ) . Yes the SMT8 and SMT4 LaGrange chips can physically fit in same socket . However major difference is in management firmware being qualified on systems built with each chip.
SMT8 chip systems qualâed with FSP for management , SMT4 chip systems qualâed w/ BMC for management . As far as I know nothing HW wise prevents for adding support for SMT8 chips with BMC but is not done as of today
Vice-versa ( SMT4 chips being qualâed with FSP/ PowerVM) wonât happen for licensing reasons . Different structure to use 24 core machine for PowerVM stack. I also suspect lots of cores / lesser SMT is not well suited for typical applications that run on that stack .
JSharp/justinrwlynn on the RCS Wiki, Twitter, and YouTube recently got OBS working on the Talos II. So as far as I know, this is the first livestream from an OpenPOWER system:
Mark Mentovai
Patch Set 2:
I appreciate the effort youâve put in, but Iâm not too keen to carry a substantial chunk of code that most of our developers have no way to validate, debug, or work on. The bare minimum to make me comfortable with this would be to either:
Clearly cordon off the new contribution as âcontribâ and maintain it only on a best-effort basis. This would mean putting it in a separate directory, although at that point, a distinct overlay repository might make more sense.
Provide sufficient test infrastructure (try- and buildbots) to provide assurance that this port functions as intended and continues to work properly.
IBM made a celebratory post about POWER9, and while they did mention Rackspace/Googleâs Zaius board, they conspicuously left out any mention of Talos II or Blackbird. Looks like Iâm not the only one who noticed:
But it doesnât exclusively say âon/in the serverâ either; and besides, Raptor will happily sell you a Talos II server, itâs not exclusively a desktop board.
A comment on the Talospace post mentioned that there was a Linux Power Architecture tower made by Terra Soft in 2008. I had never heard of this machine before, the YDL PowerStation, which used IBM 970MP chips. Linux Journal has a pretty good write up:
Initial powerpc 32 bit support has now been merged into void! Needs further testing and none of my package edits have been merged yet but they just want to do some more testing to make sure it works properly.
My first ârealâ contribution to a distro! Woo!
Yay! Iâm starting to feel some juice again about it. Iâve had a rough past couple months so Iâve just kinda dissappeared.
Theres a new os out for amigaâs called Fienix. Theres also ubuntu mate powerpc remix, which got started again recently. I was going to bring up that maybe, for the stuff that wonât work, we backport from fienix, if we even have to at all.
Shouldnât need to do much, the same guy whoâs working on the ppc64le port is also doing ppc64 big endian and most of those patches work for ppc32. He also knows what heâs doing which helps.
next up are my patches for 32 bit ppc. Shouldnât be too much longer.