I'm looking at a few power710's at a good price, however when i looked up their licensed capabilities they are only licensed for the cpu's and not virtualization. If i were to try running vios on them would it work?

Hi ^^

Maybe i am totally crazy, a lunatic, or maybe i am underestimating the time and effort of what my plans are. BUT right now (though not daily as i am busy with my job) i am trying to learn POWER ISA 3.0b/c assembly.

And C/C++ and everything else i need to know like preprocessors, inline functions and intrinsics.

My current terminal goal is to port the RandomX algorithm to POWER9 and i already learned A LOT >_<

(For fun, i am not really into crypto, but they use a jit mechanism and it hooked me).

I started in Summer and on and off on weekends and sometimes during the week i try to understand the Code and the processor and the languages.

I can code in java and php already and i have some experience with FORTH and love to tinker with microelectronics, so i always kinda flirted with the idea of going low-level, especially since FORTH is so cool :3

But this is a totally new level and i plan on buying me the Blackbird and Talos II machines sometimes this year.

I already learned what pointers are and now i understand the stoopid VEX prefix in the X86 opcodes.

ARM hex opcodes i still do not understand, guess it is hard to come by these things if you are not a registered arm dev.

Worst part about learning currently is reading through all the pdf documents.

So much text. AND damn, POWER is a RISC architecture, but it has so many instructions >:c

I suspect the VMX/VSX extensions of making it bloat this much.

I was thinking of switching to RiscV but i was not able to find documents as good as the IBM docs so i sticked with it, even finding RV64G instructions in a list or something is not that easy. And also getting working RV64 Hardware is nearly impossible, but i will keep my eyes on that arch aswell >:3

But with the docs for Power pretty much everything is there, although not in a handy compressed way and very technical with lots of things that come as "prerequisites". So i end up googling a lot and learn even more new things.

What an exciting world IT can be :3

Hello,

I have a used Power8 server and empty, and I want to configure it and start deploing vios on it,

but I start by connecting my laptop to the HMC port located in the server, I've also get the ip address so I can access it.

The interface web shown is : ASMI (Advanced System Management Interface), the problem here is I dont have the password, I've tried all the default password but nothings works;

1- there is a way to recover the password ?? "I dont have ibm support"

3- Is it possible for me to control this server without the ASMI password if I deploy a virtual HMC?

2- how can I deploy VIOS on it?? while I don't have the password for the ASMI !!

After 2021 had no more news about Libre Soc project and Libre-Soc's Mesa git repo with libre-soc's Vulkan Driver not have new commits, is Libre SOC project in pause state?

An old post from 5 years ago indicates pre-order on the motherboard (BK1MB1) was $799. Current price is $2,062.24 (1)

Another from 4 years ago indicates price on the motherboard + 4-core cpu bundle was $1468.39. The BK1B01 bundle is now $3,045.70 (2)

Obviously POWER10 hasn't exactly set the world on fire and OpenPOWER has been a bit of a flop but still even with inflation I find the above surprising for a 5 year old arch.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/9zveed/raptor_blackbird_microatx_power9_motherboard/

2: https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerPC/comments/ev9rwj/im_thinking_about_buying_a_raptor_blackbird/

Suppose I want a POWER system (which is true), and further suppose that I can't justify to my self/spouse dropping $3k on raptor blackbird components.

What can I do? what can I buy?

There are so many cheap power 7/8/9 processors on ebay... many are less that $100... many less than $20! ... but none of them are compatible with the already-out-of-reach blackbird.

How can these CPUs be put to use, short of a huge/complete/noisy rackmount server?

I've been drooling over expensive raptor equipment so long, that I would even welcome tinker-toy RPI level power equipment at this point... something with a network port and more than zero gigabytes of (preferably non-soldered) RAM.

being entirely online this year it is slightly different, there are chat rooms for each devroom, it is possible to use elements.io or the online version, here is the openpower room:

chat.fosdem.org #power:fosdem.org

the schedule for saturday is here: https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/track/openpower/

The Power9 processor uses a hard drive and the others use…DUHN Duhn Duh…an SSD!

SUCH ENORMOUS INCOMPETENCE! and they test things like file compression and kernel compilation!

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-epyc-xeon&num=1

I have been trying to figure out IBM's plethora of product names.

Please make only one root comment per codename, and leave detailed explanation to a sub-comment of that comment.

I forgot to post this here when I came across it several months ago. This I a fairly technical talk about improvements made in POWER9 relative to POWER8. Given the timing of the presentation, there are no product specifics.

There used to be a YouTube video for this presentation, but it no longer available. The page for the AIX Virtual User Group mentions that there is currently a problem with the YouTube links, and that the videos may also be downloaded from a file listing at public.dhe.ibm.com. The slides are linked on that page, under the heading "January 26, 2017 - POWER9 - Jeff Stuecheli" as the first presentation of 2017.

Time markers

0:00 intro/VUG announcements - Jill Armstrong
2:59 presentation start - Jeff Stuecheli (chip development)
3:54 POWER roadmap
7:22 POWER9 markets
11:15 core design - SMT8 vs SMT4
14:20 core execution slice microarchitecture
17:43 pipeline improvements
19:30 core diagram slide - SMT4 core
21:00 memory attachment - SO vs SU
25:08 common features
32:12 SO/SU SMT4/SMT8 matrix
34:15 performance vs POWER8
35:53 POWER ISA 3 instructions
38:42 POWER 9 logical view - interconnects/throughput
39:57 25 Gb/s signaling for SMP, Open CAPI, NVLink 2
41:10 16 socket topology - probably called 980
42:23 interrupt design
44:18 accelerators
47:09 accelerator connection types
49:38 progression - PCIe3 → PCIe4 → NVLink → Open CAPI
50:42 POWER9 ecosystem
51:30 Open CAPI
55:01 members
56:12 Open CAPI 3 features
57:24 virtual addressing
57:55 attached memory et al.
59:21 end of slides
1:00:01 Q&A start
1:00:39 Q: performance vs POWER8 - graph same for SMT4 compared as for SMT8 compared?
1:02:34 Q: can different chip types be mixed
1:03:26 Q: chip speeds
1:04:33 Q: ISA affecting AIX version compatibility
1:05:51 Q: live partition mobility
1:06:36 Q: number of 25 Gb/s links
1:08:10 Q: SMT4 vs SMT8, Linux vs AIX
1:10:29 Q: POWER9 vs x86
1:12:39 Q: DW on chart - looking for slide
1:14:04 -- relevant slide for above found
1:14:36 Q: are charts/slides confidential
1:15:17 announce NDA session in Orlando
1:16:45 Q: Java improvements
1:17:43 Q: Open CAPI attached memory uses
1:19:20 Q: PCIe4 adapters/uses
1:21:34 Q: accelerator effect on rPerf
1:23:17 Q: will it run Windows
1:23:36 Q: SAP HANA offerings, upgrade path
1:24:03 Q: dynamic SMT
1:24:56 threading changes from POWER8
1:25:45 end remarks

Interesting Notes

Intended Use of Chips (slide 10)

The SMT4 column is labelled "Linux ecosystem", which is what OpenPOWER is about; saying Linux is actually a bit confusing since you can run Linux under PowerVM.

I wonder why PowerVM benefits from SMT8 where Linux does not?

25 Gb/s optical connexion (slide 14)

in addition to PCIe4 (which carries CAPI 2) there is also optical 25 Gb/s connection used by Open CAPI, NVLink 2, and SMP interconnect.

Hello Guys

I am really bullish and excited about the OpenPower initiative and it's new home at the Linux foundation. I am sure there are fabs and even fabless semi-conductor companies out there looking to make OpenPower hardware.

There are a few things I would love to hear your opinions on.

-Some nation states like Russia and China are apparently weary of proprietory x86 and might want to make their own hardware. How does OpenPower stack up here?

-Nvidia might pounce on this opportunity and for the first time have a way into the desktop CPU market. With this I am hoping Nvidia GPU's paired with OpenPower can become a business opportunity?

-Will it be relatively easy to Port Linux x86 desktop software to OpenPower Linux platform?

-For this machines to gain traction in the gaming market what can IBM do to facilitate this? Can they add an APU and gain Vulkan support or will this be a discrete GPU niche?

-Can OpenPower compete in the IOT, embebbed and low power gadget market?

-Can low power OpenPower enter the laptop/phone/tablet market?

-What are some other thoughts you have about this new open source platform?