Not really. It does on Intel machines, but on ofw/oB machines you can do hip emulation as well as chip data captures. Power 5 and Power 4 are very very similar, and with the 2013 oB image that sink flashed you get nvme utilities along with many useful commands.
Wrap this one around your brain. Stock apple fw there’s exactly ONE kit of ram that is useable for a 32gb setup. And it’s probably one that apple themselves used. However, if you had, say, 64gb of sodimms on sodimms to dimm adapters, in openbios, you can configure blocks of storage and set up block addressing. Meaning, you could make the system think there’s 8gb of ram, for example, but the firmware can handle the memory allocation leaving you with an actual 64gb of ram. Or at least that’s what I have been told by very very reliable sources.
You could never do this with a normal x86 machine, even with libreboot. And that’s a limitation of the chipset. Ppc machines, at least from apple, have a wholly different kind of chipset. In essence it’s sorta similar to an fpga, if you needed a comparison. At least that’s the best one I can come up with. You can change EVERYTHING. Possibly even bus clock speeds and bandwidth limits, but idk that it will change stuff for the apple boxes.
Edit: another description could be that ofw/oB are almost like a whole os unto themselves. And not the systemd meme of it being an os. I mean like you could probably port lynx and connect to Google. That’s how powerful it is just by itself.
Also fun note is there’s a lot of similarities between other machines (sun, sgi, etc boxes that have same fw type). So potentially I could flash oB to my sunblade 2500 or to an ultra45/60 and get the same result as sink did with her G5. It really is a completely different landscape, and shows what real workstations, albeit opensource based ones, are actually capable of.
There’s reasons I like this hardware specifically, and not because old stuff is cool ![:stuck_out_tongue: :stuck_out_tongue:](https://forum.level1techs.com/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=9)
Edit 2: also for note, those nvme chipsets probably emulate a similar operating environment to what these machines can provide. I’m not saying nvme was made for these machines, but nvme certainly likes more open space to work with, if that makes sense.