News from IBM and POWER8 / POWER9 plans

[Carlos]

http://www.infoworld.com/article/3088168/processors/battle-lines-are-drawn-ibm-prepares-power9-to-take-on-intel-and-arm.html

The number of "vendors who have the skills to be able to take a sophisticated processor and do derivatives of it for the server market is actually perhaps a smaller universe than we thought," Balog said.

[Carlos]

New POWER8 benchmarks from ANANDTECH:
Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Little Endian

Very interesting read, IMO. All in all, not that bad

[Carlos]

Another article about IBM
Will IBM Sell Its Mainframe Business?

In my view, a clueless person

[Casper]

I do hope some vendors adapt the POWER cores to a lower TDP

[Carlos]

The Prospects For A Power9 Revolution

[Carlos]

Big Blue Aims For The Sky With Power9

[Casper]

A lot of POWER9 news, but I'm still waiting for either an NXP update on their Power chips or a full fat POWER chip that is energy efficiënt enough.

It does look like NXP's product page for QorIQ has been updated (there are now 2 Power tabs, one for the P series and one for the T series of Power processors).

http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and-processors/more-processors/qoriq-platforms:QORIQ_HOME

[Carlos]

This hope, I also have. Maybe a new Silicon Valley startup will be founded, e. g. PA Supersemi ;-)
BTW, nice find
I think even NXP don't know what they will do in the next couple month. But AFAIK, mostly all "Freescale POWER" engineers jumped ship and when even IBM workers (Amiga.org forum) say, it could be better switch to ARM instead of "PowerPC" ... that gives us a deep inside ...

Motorola/ Freescale never had any luck. In 2000 Intel bought up all Motorola PowerPC engineers. Intel was sued in 2001 for this. If you ask this guys about this, even today they don't comment on this whole incident. This also was the big "Motorola G5" crash.

[Casper]

Well, the e6500 cores were released in 2012, so they must still have an engineering group going on there. I do remember seeing a followup NGC (Next Generation Core) in their roadmap to follow up the e6500 cores in the high end (and ARM on the low end). As far as I know, the Power based QorIQ chips still enjoy massive popularity in military, rugged and high-end networking gear. I think, with so many costumers and a new potentially already worked on that they might continue their Power line. I also keep seeing the emphasis they place on the fact that the Power cores are multi-threaded and optimized for virtualization (especially their T4240 with it's 12 cores and 24 threads, imagine using that in our laptop  ) . If IBM also opens up their chip designs, it might become easier for NXP to alter existing full Power designs, but I'm not a chip designer, so I'm not sure.

Speculation can't hurt .

[Carlos]

Speculation is pure pleasure
This are all well-chosen arguments from you
But I remember Freescales business decision to throw out AltiVec in future SoC-designs. That was in about 2008/ 2009. And the manager that was involved significantly in this decision jumped ship a few month later to ... tata ... Intel

And the whole military-industry was crying about the loss of AltiVec.

In the Freescale roadmaps was also mentioned a "T5", but sadly never heard from this again.

[Casper]

The new core was supposed to launch in 2015, but I suppose the takeover by NXP probably changed things.
Could be it's delayed, but since they reshuffled the website, I think it would be strange if they'd axed their Power line.
I wouldn't be surprised if they came out with the chip later anyway, the e6500 cores are still complaint with the 2.07 Power ISA and the 3.0 Power ISA POWER9 chips aren't even out yet.

Since AltiVec is an integral part of the PowerISA now, I don't think it's going anywhere.

[Carlos]

Faster than x86: IBM introduces new OpenPower servers with Linux for HPC, Deep Learning and Advanced Analytics

[Carlos]

OpenCAPI: Coherent Interconnect for hardware accelerators (Google translator)

Don't find any good report on english sites.

[Carlos]

Thomas Krenn is also offering OpenPOWER (POWER8) servers:
https://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/actions/open-power.html

The only european company so far.

[Casper]

I sincerely hope an embedded solution comes out of the OpenPOWER Foundation, server hardware isn't going to get us far.