Everday integer functions ran quite fast, but floating point suffered. Javascript was the biggest killer of Bulldozer based parts in terms of web performance.
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I am still on Poor-dozer for my desktop. IT was a design ahead of itâs time. And with all of the mitigations in place on the Intel hardware due to exploits of their [Intelâs] Hyper-threading implementation, Bulldozer has proven to be a competitive platform, especially now that software is being programmed to be multi-threaded and task schedulers are actually aware of hardware differences. Bulldozer shined best on not MS Windows systems.
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True, I built a few linux servers based on the Bulldozer Era Opterons and they worked quite well. Very efficient for the smaller server tasks or parallel server tasks since most of it was integer workloads vs FP like games on desktop.
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It is excellent to hear that, though somewhat disheartening to see how long such work takes on a donated budget.
If there is a sequel up project in the future, I wonder if we would see it as a drop in replacement for a frame.work chassis,
as I wrote this I decided to check the comments on the blog post:
Roberto Innocenti
2023-07-13 09:48
⌠in fact we are in contact with Frameworks, we are interested in future collaborations with them, âŚ
Not that it should really be a concern at the moment, changing chassis now unnecessarily would be a grievous waste of funds.
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what is the state of POWER these days? It seems like a lot has happened since this thread was first started.
I touched on some POWER servers at work a number of years back, actually about the same time as this thread was started, and it looked promising but we had issues with the software ecosystem. IBM sold us on the idea that we could use GitHub - biobuilds/biobuilds: Curated collection of open-source bioinformatics tools for all of our software needs, but when we started trying to port over some workflows, we immediately hit issues with the POWER built versions of the software not working. Looking at that git repo it has not been touched in 5 years, and https://biobuilds.org/ now points to some other non-IBM company, does not give me much hope. Are things still progressing in other fields for POWER?
One of the reasons my enthusiasm about power isa dropped, is because voidlinux-ppc creator and maintainer dropped it and created his own chimera os: A modern, general-purpose non-GNU Linux distribution. It uses llvm clang, uses apkv3 from alpine, does a lot of things right, but I just canât get excited about it. IDK whatâs the status on packages support, but I doubt itâs any better than void or nix (alpine in general seems to be lacking on that side even with the community repo, I canât imagine a lesser known distro would fare any better, particularly since some programs build templates need to be adapter for ppc).
I still hope the guys at libre-soc manage to get something workable, but Iâve been focusing on really low-power stuff, like ARM and which will eventually lead to me hopping over to RISC-V when it gets decently powerful and gathers more software support.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, power stuff is very pricey to get into (look at raptor computers). Or if you want to dip your toes, try finding old macs (of which perf. and perf/watt will be atrocious).
And with what IBM did to Red Hat (not that RH was a really trustworthy company either, but seemed to get worse under IBM), I donât think I trust big blue to keep the ISA open. Once thereâs more adoption, theyâll quickly switch around. That is also potentially true of RISC-V, but itâd be way harder for them to pull it off (because their entire support was built around openness, while IBMâs power didnât start out as open and was more of a âthis thing is backed by a big corporation that could probably never go underâ).
The open ISA to me is a very minor thing; the openness advantage of POWER chips is the lack of proprietary blobs needed to operate them. RISC-V chips can (and some do) require proprietary blobs of code to turn on. Besides, the ISA for Power has been (as I understand) the property of the Linux Foundation since OpenPOWER Foundation became its subsidiary in 2019.
As for IBMâs trustworthiness, yes it can and has wavered on the chip openness front (POWER10 for example has required some proprietary blobs for its memory controllers) but to my knowledge POWER8/POWER9 is still best situation for an open, serious CPU since OpenSPARC and its UltraSPARC T1 and T2.
Apparently though, we will be soon seeing non-IBM alternatives,
Also, while much less powerful and (I think) requiring some sort of blobs its NXP-made CPU, the PowerPC Notebook project is still slowly and steadily making progress,
https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/
Note that its CPU lacks AltiVec (PowerPC SIMD, akin to SSE or AVX on x86), so some software may be unexpectedly slower if it depends on SIMD.