The POWER and PowerPC General Discussion / News Thread

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)

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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.

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HHEHHEHE got the GigaAccel 180 fixstars working image
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

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What is a gigaaccel good for?

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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

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Is it good for h265 encoding?

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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.

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Don’t buy them all before I can ;A;

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Lmao I have a 3950x for cpu encodes. It is a beast! But if I can get a power system, I had a g5 quad sold it for 200 bucks to a friend. I was wanting weed money.

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I mean if I’m honest weed is a lot better than a G5…

But thats just me ;D

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not to me anymore. i regret it i sold my ps3 for weed. hell i sdold my volcano for weed. this was when i lost my job after my diagnosis.

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PS3 is better than weed so I’d regret that.

At least its all cheap as chips now XD

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Damn you I was reading that

It was supposed to be a linked topic, but Discourse somehow changed its mind at the last moment. I will try to repost it once Discourse lets me.

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To step my toes into POWER, what should I get a g5 to start with?

Legit, I’d just look for a consumer owned G5. Don’t get one from a uni or anything. Reason is, Uni’s updated OpenFirmware, where most of the time, at least, users didn’t. If I’m lucky with my OFW tweaks you’ll have an overclocking utility :3

Also, 2.5 GHZ and 2.7GHZ dual cores (single chip) are the ones you want.

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To be pedantic, POWER is only referring to the IBM product line of POWER chips, or the ISA used for POWER1 & POWER2.

So technically the G5’s processor, the IBM PowerPC 970 isn’t really a “POWER” CPU, but according to Wikipedia it was made as a lower-end version of the POWER4 – looking at the RCS Wiki Power ISA chart, maybe it is more like a POWER4+?


So if you just want to experiment with PowerPC, especially if you want to use Mac OS X on it, a G5 is the best you can get; though it is infamously power-hungry.

If you are curious about Power/PowerPC SIMD (AltiVec/VMX/Velocity Engine), you definitely want to avoid POWER chips earlier than POWER6; before this point POWER did not have SIMD – so that is definitely an advantage of the PPC 970 over POWER4.

The VMX/AltiVec version of SIMD has 32 registers, but with POWER7, IBM doubled the register count to 64 registers, and called it VSX (Vector Scalar Extension). So if that interests you, look for POWER7 or later. Looking at the reference manual for the e6500 from Freescale/NXP, it looks like only IBM implemented VSX.
Also note, the e5500 (used by the A-EON X5000) does not have SIMD at all.

Lastly, if you want to experiment with OpenPOWER firmware, that did not exist before POWER8. Earlier machines use an implementation of IEEE 1275-1994 (Open Firmware); different companies used different implementations; kind of like UEFI in that regard.


That is my line of thinking anyway. Personally, I am waiting until I can afford a Blackbird, since even OpenPOWER systems can still have some firmware blobs; besides, I have a G4 laptop to play with in the meantime.

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Alot of power nerds out in the wild swear by g4 stuff and g5 near the end of production. Due to community support. Personally cellbe is also ppc as it shares alot but not everything finding a IBM qs21 is possible on eBay but needs a blade center unlike other IBM power systems that are more stand alone with more information then cell. Check your local cl or like thing and thrift stores before jumping on a system attempt for more modern stuff stay in the g5 2005 realm or if you wanna drop alot of money an Amiga board and next up raptor systems

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