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General Hardware Discussion / LTT video has me daydreaming about AM5 boards...
« on: February 04, 2025, 02:35:11 am »
So I just watched this video by everyone's favorite 5'1" Canadian, and it has me daydreaming a little. Be warned, there will be copious amounts of unsupported claims and baseless optimism ahead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EXrxGByJJg
If chipsets can be flashed to support brand new hardware, I wonder if you could reverse engineer and flash an AM5 chipset like X770 to support an OpenPOWER or ARM processor down the line, even if it means erasing support for AMD ones. It could be a good budget option to get people into the ecosystem; even if it's not free, I think most of the people here are willing to bend that a little considering the widespread use of graphics cards. I know one of the main reasons there isn't more development is that the hardware is too expensive (the main reason I've heard people say they were interested in Blackbird but didn't plan on getting one), and while Raptor is I'm sure working on that and hopefully getting Talos III/BBII back down toward 2019 prices, for someone who cares less about how fully open their hardware is and cares more about simpler ISAs that run more efficiently or don't want to buy into the big duopoly (which admittedly I'm kind of more toward, not that end user ownership isn't important to me, just not an end-all-be-all), that might be interesting.
Now, yes, this would require getting new processors made, and that would be fairly pricey, particularly in whittling something desktop-class out of presumably licensed Power11 IP (or potentially backporting libreSoC innovations back into Microwatt and beefing it up from there)... but if someone could just flash their chipset on an AMD processor, take the cooler off, and drop in a PowerPC or ARM part, it might generate some interest. I'm sure the kind of person interested in this would be more than willing to drop $450 or even $500 on a drop-in replacement, should this be a realistic and viable thing in the first place, rather than spend $1600 on a whole new build. I mean, 7800X3D is about $450 and it's in many ways about on par with POWER9, some wins, some losses. And with the coming node freeze circa 2028 at 1nm, it might get fairly cheap to get it down to 5 or 3 nm by the circa 2030 date of arrival I would imagine it would have at the earliest.
Unlikely and a lot of money put in, sure, but it certainly seems like at present, X99/C612 upgrades of a similar sort to this (if staying within amd64) are very common in places like China, Russia, and Brazil. And I know that chipsets can be flashed to support new processors, the AMD 300 chipsets were. AM5 is shaping up to be a very common generation it seems considering the Intel 13th/14th blunder, so if this is doable and viable, it might be a good option to pick in terms of potential install base since there probably will be an AM6 circa 2030 or so, around the time that something like this would be out, and this would give at least some of those boards an even longer life. And, if you wanted, you could also use those same AM5 PowerPC CPUs in new boards with new chipsets for selling consumer-level PCs. That's something I'd been interested in if somewhat distantly, I have a vision for what prebuilt PowerPC... PCs could look like. That's absolutely cocky to say, I admit, but I do have that level of confidence in this one area... and a few others, but those are entirely unrelated. All I can say is it takes that old Commodore 64 slogan, "Welcome to the world of friendly computing", entirely seriously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EXrxGByJJg
If chipsets can be flashed to support brand new hardware, I wonder if you could reverse engineer and flash an AM5 chipset like X770 to support an OpenPOWER or ARM processor down the line, even if it means erasing support for AMD ones. It could be a good budget option to get people into the ecosystem; even if it's not free, I think most of the people here are willing to bend that a little considering the widespread use of graphics cards. I know one of the main reasons there isn't more development is that the hardware is too expensive (the main reason I've heard people say they were interested in Blackbird but didn't plan on getting one), and while Raptor is I'm sure working on that and hopefully getting Talos III/BBII back down toward 2019 prices, for someone who cares less about how fully open their hardware is and cares more about simpler ISAs that run more efficiently or don't want to buy into the big duopoly (which admittedly I'm kind of more toward, not that end user ownership isn't important to me, just not an end-all-be-all), that might be interesting.
Now, yes, this would require getting new processors made, and that would be fairly pricey, particularly in whittling something desktop-class out of presumably licensed Power11 IP (or potentially backporting libreSoC innovations back into Microwatt and beefing it up from there)... but if someone could just flash their chipset on an AMD processor, take the cooler off, and drop in a PowerPC or ARM part, it might generate some interest. I'm sure the kind of person interested in this would be more than willing to drop $450 or even $500 on a drop-in replacement, should this be a realistic and viable thing in the first place, rather than spend $1600 on a whole new build. I mean, 7800X3D is about $450 and it's in many ways about on par with POWER9, some wins, some losses. And with the coming node freeze circa 2028 at 1nm, it might get fairly cheap to get it down to 5 or 3 nm by the circa 2030 date of arrival I would imagine it would have at the earliest.
Unlikely and a lot of money put in, sure, but it certainly seems like at present, X99/C612 upgrades of a similar sort to this (if staying within amd64) are very common in places like China, Russia, and Brazil. And I know that chipsets can be flashed to support new processors, the AMD 300 chipsets were. AM5 is shaping up to be a very common generation it seems considering the Intel 13th/14th blunder, so if this is doable and viable, it might be a good option to pick in terms of potential install base since there probably will be an AM6 circa 2030 or so, around the time that something like this would be out, and this would give at least some of those boards an even longer life. And, if you wanted, you could also use those same AM5 PowerPC CPUs in new boards with new chipsets for selling consumer-level PCs. That's something I'd been interested in if somewhat distantly, I have a vision for what prebuilt PowerPC... PCs could look like. That's absolutely cocky to say, I admit, but I do have that level of confidence in this one area... and a few others, but those are entirely unrelated. All I can say is it takes that old Commodore 64 slogan, "Welcome to the world of friendly computing", entirely seriously.
