[geeks] New POWER9 motherboard coming out...

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Fri, 8 Feb 2019, Nathan Raymond wrote:

> "The major selling point to the second group is that the firmware is fully
> open-source and auditable even down to the FPGA level
>
> That's pretty wonderful these days. I'm pretty sure the few desktop ARMv8
> systems out there aren't anywhere near that open.

Indeed.  The ARM IP space is ate up with paranoia.  At work, we've got a
SoftIron 1000 box we're evaluating for a development station, and I'm
considering either a HiKey970 or ROCKpro64 for myself.  They're all very
blobby.

> One of the few I'm aware of is the Gigabyte ThunderXStation, and it's
> aimed primarily at developers creating apps to run on ARMv8 in the
> datacenter.

I was really excited about that machine when news about it first came out
(and also about AMD's yet-to-appear successor to the Opteron A1100), but a
base configuration is north of $2700.  In light of what an Octane or Ultra
60 ran, it's cheap, but it can't touch POWER9 or Ryzen in performance per
dollar.

> There's RISC-V, but right now it's still just embedded or small
> single-board computers. Would be nice if someone made notebooks and
> desktops based on it with open-source firmware, which might happen
> someday, but we're still years off from that.

I'd bet more on that than on ARM-based open systems.  RISC-V is attracting
a whole bunch of interested embedded players who'd like to move off 8051
clones, but there's no reason that it has to stay on the low end.  Once
someone puts it into a phone or console, developer workstations will be
forthcoming.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
Austin, TX
USA