OpenPOWER ISA > Third Party CPU Discussion

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

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MauryG5:
I completely agree with Classic, I don't think Risc V can compete with the Power architecture, let's say it's a world apart.

Hasturtium:

--- Quote from: MPC7500 on August 31, 2024, 02:27:38 pm ---HiFive Unmatched $740

--- End quote ---

If you want to play with the Unmatched you'll want to order from Mouser - they have the same board on sale for $299. Caveats apply: this is being clearanced out because SiFive's Premier P550 has been announced and will likely ship before the end of the year. And they are not fast - performance is north of a Pi 3B+ but well south of a Pi 4, and there is no SIMD whatsoever. Just about any GPU made in the last decade will be bottlenecked in one way or another, though I believe patches are landing about now to facilitate RISC-V operation with current Radeons. I can't emphasize the sluggishness enough - maybe it was on IRC where a dev talked about how his Power9 could emulate a RISC-V machine that was at least as fast as the Unmatched, and possibly with more threads.

power9mm:

--- Quote from: MauryG5 on August 31, 2024, 03:23:23 pm ---I completely agree with Classic, I don't think Risc V can compete with the Power architecture, let's say it's a world apart.

--- End quote ---
That's why I went with raptor, riscv just isn't suitable for a desktop imo.

kanunay:
I looked into this a long time ago and determined that the minimal investment required to produce actual silicon based on Microwatt was somewhere around $20 million. If Microwatt (or POWER in general) had the kind of interest RISC-V has, perhaps someone could raise that amount of money. As it stands right now, the only place we could ever hope of getting an actual chip from is IBM itself and I don't see that happening.

As for boards, there are people around who are skilled enough with KiCAD that an excellent open-source board could produced if a chip existed. For now, those of us who like to experiment with Microwatt have to be satisfied with FPGA soft cores running at extremely slow speeds (100 MHz and less).

MPC7500:
Banana Pi BPI-F3 approx. $99

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