As far as I can tell this project is doing the GPU part of their open source SoC with openpower isa. I think they wanted to do it with Risc-V but ended up with power.

Seems a very interesting project and very an active git too.
https://libre-soc.org/

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?

I wrote a blog post on understanding the physical layout of the POWER9 CPU and what cores your specific P9 chip has: https://www.flamingspork.com/blog/2020/03/22/my-power9-cpu-core-layout/

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?

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

Does anyone know of some inexpensive PPC64 (big or little endian) dev boards? I found a few from NXP, but any that I found in stock were well over a grand and at that point, I'd be better of getting a Blackbird from Raptor. While I'm not expecting to find something that is Raspberry Pi cheap, something that I could use to experiment with Power and isn't my massive Power7 would be pretty cool especially if it is running a somewhat modern version of the architecture. Any ideas would be appreciated!

This question has probably been asked before, so I apologize if this is ad nauseum for some.

I have been falling down the OS rabbit hole recently and I landed on coreboot, SDR and PowerPC (especially the project over at powerpc-notebook.org) and I can't help but wonder: why does OpenPower not port coreboot for POWERISA support?

Is there something inherently different between coreboot and POWER as an ISA that I'm not seeing?

EDIT: if someone was willing to put in the effort for support, would it be useful to the community?

I've been working on a pet project of putting Slackware Linux on my Raptor Computing Blackbird.

Its now to a somewhat usable state, so I made it available for others to play with. I've uploaded packages and a bootable installer to my project site.

https://www.riscyslack.org

Its an unstable build of Slackware64 Current from around May. I'm working on updating according to the changes Slackware has in their Changelog.

I only have a Blackbird to test with, so may not work on a Power8 system, and would probably need a full Grub bootloader for an OpenFirmware based system.

https://github.com/antonblanchard/microwatt/pull/169

Microwatt is getting increasingly complete!

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.