Agreed! An open processor architecture has strictly greater value to me than a proprietary one. x86 is only a good option today because competitors have been allowed to implement it (and often better than Intel). The opening of PowerPC is great news, and hopefully not the "end" of anything.
I don't know where this idea comes from that open-sourcing a platform is a step down. Had Linux started out closed-source and then gone open-source, I think it would be clear to everyone (knowing what we know today) that this would be a huge benefit to all. Same with Javascript, or the JVM, or CLR, or any other platform. Open platforms at any level have more value, full stop.
Is keeping an ISA proprietary of real value to anyone these days? The cost of entry is still high enough that you're not going to be threatened by J Random Hacker. We can already see this. ARM is available for people to license, and TSMC will fab chips for you, yet Apple's CPU division doesn't seem to be seriously threatened by anyone.
And think about what fully opening up POWER like this begins to enable!
IBM has poured a ton of money into having roughly the same ecosystem for POWER as x86: nearly every major Linux distribution ships ppc64le ports [0] (most at full parity to their x86 server release--including testing and building on the platform itself), there's several places to get access to it (even for free as I mentioned on a previous thread [1,2]), and several FPGAs, GPUs, and other accelerator cards work with it [3,4].
Going past x86 (and competing with RISC-V and others), there's a freely available softcore (as I mentioned elsewhere) [5]. And since IBM open sourced the latest ISA with a full, modern instruction set (AES, SHA, Vectors...) -- the community around a softore could eventually go and implement it [6]. And as Talos has shown, even most of the microcode is open source or at least publicly verifiable.
Once the community forms around it, what do you have? [7]
A starting point for all sorts of new projects. Someone else has done nearly all of the work to build something amazingly complex (from hardware gates to a working NodeJS/Go/$LANG stack): all you need to do is tailor this to what you need.
Want to optimize to your specific workload? Grab the softcore, pull out the portions you don't need, deploy/test on a FPGA, and run Linux over the top with a full suite of debugging tools already available.
Want to experiment with new instructions not currently available? Grab a softcore, implement your new instructions, add compiler support or assembly support, and iterate.
Want a low-power core for an IOT device? You could license ARM or you could build on a free POWER softcore.
Want tons of scalar cores for a massively parallel problem? Write it in C, compile to ppc64le, and deploy on many instances of the same softcore running on a FPGA.
None of this is possible with x86 or RISC-V today. If it is, the overhead, time, expertise, and cost makes it exclusive to only large companies and research institutions. IBM has done most of the work to commoditize this. Costs to fab will remain high but deploying on a FPGA would at least tell you if your approach is viable and something you could consider.
Yeah, Intel or AMD could eventually open source this much too. But they'd have to start having conversations with their lawyers... And then with all their partners... And then eventually they'd get to where POWER is today... :)
[6]: Yeah, there's admittedly a lot of work to go from "scalar softcore" to "100% ISA implementation". But if IBM does things correctly and tries to build a community, especially of academic researchers, around the softcore... It could go somewhere.
> And as Talos has shown, even most of the microcode is open source or at least publicly verifiable.
All of the microcode and firmware is fully verifiable and owner buildable/modifiable. Even the secure boot root trust keys are publicly known and can be personalised with your own key with, of course, the well-known key distrusted. AFAIK, the only thing that isn't owner modifiable (or modifiable by anyone else really), besides the silicon, is the one-time programmable ROM which the processor bootstraps from on power-on is publicly verifiable w/ assembler source code. Datasheets and programming information is available for almost every single chip on the board - as are schematics (woohoo! I've already used them to make repairs a few times). As of right now, the only blob required, on the stock system, is related to the broadcom network chip firmware - and that's been fully reverse engineered and a beta version of the firmware which is clean room open source is now available (project ortega).
It's the most open and hacker-friendly system I've ever owned and I really wouldn't want to have to go back to something less.
Yes! Free if you're working on an open source project (check out Oregon State University's Open Source Lab's POWER offerings: VMs (+/- GPUs) and Jenkins integrations). That's what I use.
If you're working on something commercial, you might check out http://integricloud.com/ -- looks like they start at start at $250/mo for a dedicated system (with 16-cores). If you check out their billing rates, it sounds like you can get a single core/thread though for about ~10-20 a month: http://integricloud.com/content/base/managevms.html?viewrate...
(I've never used integricloud but someone commented on my comment mentioning OSUOSL from a week ago)
I don't know where this idea comes from that open-sourcing a platform is a step down. Had Linux started out closed-source and then gone open-source, I think it would be clear to everyone (knowing what we know today) that this would be a huge benefit to all. Same with Javascript, or the JVM, or CLR, or any other platform. Open platforms at any level have more value, full stop.
Is keeping an ISA proprietary of real value to anyone these days? The cost of entry is still high enough that you're not going to be threatened by J Random Hacker. We can already see this. ARM is available for people to license, and TSMC will fab chips for you, yet Apple's CPU division doesn't seem to be seriously threatened by anyone.