OpenPOWER ISA > Third Party CPU Discussion

Why haven't we seen boards with Power9 / MicroWatt?

(1/3) > >>

mparnaudeau:
I have this question that stays in my mind for a long time ...

Power ISA is open, MicroWatt was announced and published in 2019, with the main actor Anton Blanchard saying that "the goal for Blanchard was to see if he could make it, and as a software developer, taking on a very low level hardware project was a challenge" (from Wikipedia but I attended the OpenPower Summit Europe the same year and understood quite the same). That did not reassured me but I had the hope that after the proof of concept, this enabled will be used as a base for real products and for example a small board to allow developers to play with it at low cost, and promote the architecture. And even more after the project evolved enough to make run Linux and Zephyr operating systems.

I think that's very sad that no board was created, that IBM has not officialy adopted this project or allowed resources to help structuring a side organism (OpenPower Foundation, Raptor CS ...) to do that.

What was missing? Why don't we get a board? Who could be interested in doing that? (if it's not too late)

@ClassicHasClass In 2020, you wrote "The possibility of a single-board Microwatt-based system (and fully reprogrammable, too) gets closer every day" so I suppose that you hoped the same.

It seems that the only implementation that went to the end is Kestrel. All other known initiatives seemed to be attempts that led nowhere unfortunately. There is an empty page about PowerPI at OpenPower Foundation (https://openpowerfoundation.org/groups/powerpi/). At Euro BSDCon 2023 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj4Q-m_WEh0&t=220s&ab_channel=EuroBSDcon), there is also a PowerSBC mentioned, for which we find zero information elsewhere ...

cy384:
I think everyone interested in processor development went towards RISCV instead, which has way more community energy.  FPGA development is also very niche skill and it's way harder to do anything compared to pure software, so the general pool of people able to work on projects like microwatt is much smaller.

Open source projects like this only get done if a company decides to do them (and it seems like no companies think they could make money on it), or someone has the skills AND time AND interest (which is all a very large investment for an individual).

Maybe someone could develop a minimal carrier board for the Arctic Tern module, which does use microwatt.  It has a enough peripherals to use as a standalone linux system.  $600+ for that would be a tough sell given the limited performance, though.

ClassicHasClass:
Well, you kind of can: Arctic Tern is a Microwatt device. The main issue there is the expense, and it's intended as a replacement BMC instead of a cheap screw-around-with board.

lepidotos:
I'd say cy is right, RISC-V has all the meme status. And hey, it is an open standard ISA; but people just don't know PowerPC is just as open as it so it's mostly just enthusiasts coming from the Power Mac or Amiga or the die-hard of die-hard free hardware enthusiasts, who might still find something to prefer about the RISC-V boards, like the Pioneer's Micro ATX form factor giving it more expansion slots and replaceable RAM. Though that's really rubbing up to the cost of a Blackbird by that point...

Borley:
If RCS sought to develop and sell RISC-V systems, I would have no reservations about buying any. It's not that I have any particular loyalty to PowerPC or anything. It just happened to be the most mature, complete and performant solution available.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page