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General OpenPOWER Discussion / Re: News?

« on: June 12, 2022, 08:07:21 pm »

For example, do you see the IBM POWER9 chips continuing to be available in sufficient quantities for the Raptor ecosystem?

Yes, there are many, many years worth of the CPUs available.

In this respect POWER9 is far more secure than POWER10 or any of its competitors.

Three years ago 14LPP wafers were running in New York (East Fishkill, I think, but maybe Malta) and production was starting up in Dresden as a second site.  There are probably additional sites by now; my attention has been focused elsewhere lately.  In any case, just those two locations alone are a whole lot more geopolitical security than the rest of the industry has.  14LPP isn't the same as IBM's special eDRAM-cap variant of 14nm, but it would be very unusual for it to not be running from the same sites as the less-flashy merchant foundry wafers.

Don't worry about supply of chips.  Supply of blackbird motherboards, on the other hand...

Do you see any other manufacturer coming along with a 100% open chip to continue from POWER9?

Short answer: yes.  Long answer: [redacted] skunkworks [redacted].

LibreSoC is also working in the background and contining to make progress,

I've been having a hard time finding information about their 180nm tapeout.  The chips came back almost a year ago; are any data available?  How did things turn out?  Surely there's been time for several iterations with a FIB by now...

we're not looking at a single pathway to the required silicon here, just that all pathways produce 100% blob free ppc64le ISA 2.07+ compatible devices.

Unfortunately getting the foundries to care about anything other than your organization's market cap is a gigantic obstacle these days.  Design quality and engineering talent are not taken into consideration anymore.