Water Cooler > General OpenPOWER Discussion
Announcement from Raptor / Solid Silicon Corp
Hasturtium:
It looks like the truth is considerably more interesting - per our own ClassicHasClass, this won't be a Power10 CPU, but it will be SMT-4 capable and offer competitive features.
AdamJoseph:
I want to believe in this as much as anybody else here, but the only way this adds up -- and it's still quite a stretch -- is if this chip really is a Power10, possibly with very minor metal-mask-only changes (like the spectre-fix stepping of Power9), and Raptor somehow miraculously talked IBM into this but couldn't convince them to license the "Power10" trademark. Like I said, quite a stretch.
I'd love to believe that somebody other than IBM is doing an owner-controlled, independently-developed PowerISA 3.2 chip on a leading-edge node. But that's way into "flying pigs in snowy hell" territory. It's eight figures just for the maskset on anything newer than Power9's GloFo14 process. What sort of investor gave that kind of cash to a company which did not seem to exist until this announcement surfaced? (and can I have some? :) ) Not to mention the lead times! If this was an independent design with any chance of shipping by end of 2024, there would be physical MPW samples already.
I'd love to be totally wrong about all of this.
Even if it is a "white label Power10", there are still a lot of questions. What's the story with the memory controller? I saw some comment somewhere suggesting maybe putting a serial-to-parallel (OMI-to-DDR) fanout chip (the heatsinked chip in this photo) inside the same package as the CPU die, along with an immutable ROM for its firmware. But that too seems improbable... those fanout chips are designed to drive really short traces on the same PCB (this is a big part of the power savings they claim). The odds that they would be able to drive big long traces passing across a DIMM slot and cardedge seem slim. None of the other customers buying those chips need that capability (if they did, they wouldn't be fooling around with OMI in the first place).
MPC7500:
--- Quote from: rjzak on October 21, 2023, 12:15:38 pm ---I really hope the new motherboard has nvme slots, and maybe more USB ports. SATA would be nice too.
--- End quote ---
Yes. Also hibernation, faster boot times, and adjusting fan curves without recompiling would be nice.
tle:
S1 is now confirmed a POWER9. There are so many quirks with the way Raptor motherboard arranges components. Notably the PCIe slots leaves no room to install big GPU card.
Here are my wishlist for S1-based Raptor (if they are to use the same name):
* Hibernation
* built-in NVMe slot for host OS
* 4 USB ports: 2x USB type C and 2x USB type A
* 1 2.5GbE ethernet port
* Another PCIex4 slot
AdamJoseph:
--- Quote from: tle on October 22, 2023, 06:58:52 pm ---S1 is now confirmed a POWER9.
--- End quote ---
Since POWER9 is ISA 3.0, and the announcement said ISA 3.1, how is this possible?
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