The link seems to be getting the YCombinator hug-of-death. I can't read the article at all.
Since POWER9 only exists in the server / HEDT sphere, I doubt this will be a modern POWER9 chip. Maybe something like a NXP-chip, which would still be interesting. Something on the scale of a Chromebook maybe?
If binaries were compatible with the Talos II POWER9 HEDT / Server, then there is still a good use of this laptop. To serve as a portable development platform, much like Intel Atom can serve as a portable development platform for Intel Xeons.
Depends on a lot of details however. Honestly, its probably more important to rack-up a POWER9 Talos II and just SSH into it every once in a while... modern cloud-based services makes this sort of thing much easier.
----------
EDIT: Site finally worked for me. NXP T2080 chip, 4-core / 8-thread 28nm class chip. e6500 core, which is some form of PowerPC for sure... 128-bit vector units (Altivec). 32kB L1 d$ and 32kB L1 I$, 2MB L2$ for the whole chip.
This is older-tech for sure, definitely "Chromebook" level of tech, maybe a touch weaker even.
EDIT2: I think there's something to be said about an "open" design, where the schematics are available for the community to use and extend. The NXP T2080 has good GPIO pins and connectivity, so there's a chance that this laptop will be easier to interface with electronically than other devices. Guys over at hackaday probably would love something like this. https://gitlab.com/oshw-powerpc-notebook/powerpc-laptop-mobo...
If I followed the links correctly, it's a 1GHz-ish PPC derivative from a shop you for whom processors are a minor part of their product line. The motherboards linked to appear to all top out at 2GB of SoDIMM memory. So maybe "that's cool" but not "that's generally useful" and personally not "I'll spend money on that".
People are getting down-voted for asking what year it is, but I’m going to “what year is this?”
I’m not discounting the effort that goes into place here — at least I’m trying not to — but like, why would anyone look at PowerPC for portables in 2019 when the whole reason Apple shifted to Intel 14 years ago was thermals? Wouldn’t ARM be better?
I’m sure I’m missing something but I just don’t understand this on any level except for some obsession with “openness” at the expense of actually doing anything.
> when the whole reason Apple shifted to Intel 14 years ago was thermals? Wouldn’t ARM be better?
The move to Intel wasn't because the instruction set is, for some reason, superior (it isn't), it's because IBM couldn't keep up with Intel's fabrication technology. The G5 chip from 2002 was at 130nm, while the Intel design introduced in 2006 (when 4 year old G5 was the best IBM had to offer) was at 65nm.
The chip they aim for is built on a 28nm process (which has some impact on voltages used and minimum conversion of power into heat). That's definitely not top-class, but good enough: it's about a factor 3 to the state of the art (compared to factor 2 between G5 and Intel Core in 2006), but in absolute terms it's so much closer.
There are enough ARM laptops out there, this provides another venue for more vendor independence (ARM still exerts tight control over its ISA while PowerPC is a close cousin to Power9 which was opened recently). In short, for a project like this, the goal isn't the very best performance on the market, it's "the more the merrier".
I have to say, I'm really happy that this seems a sort of resurgence of a proper CPU architecture diversity. I'm getting bored of the x86/ARM dichotomy.
Having few instruction set architectures, or even one, enables quicker and more efficient software development by lowering barrier to entry (easier to learn and study just one ISA instead of many) and lowering the amount of maintenance and development work that has to be done on development infrastructure such as compilers.
This is assuming royalties don't have to be paid to an ISA creator, which is a separate issue.
A single ISA doesn't have to mean there is a single CPU vendor or CPU manufacturer.
I'll celebrate implementation diversity, but I'm not sure why I'd celebrate interface diversity. All it does is create pointless incompatibilities that users have to deal with.
I think it's great that many companies have their own implementation of open standards like Unicode, TCP/IP, and SMTP. Life was worse in every way when every company had their own special encodings for text files, and their own proprietary network protocols. I can type some text in Japanese and email it to a friend, in 2019, and it will just work. Excellent!
The continued survival of x86 and other proprietary instruction sets reeks to me of the days of the "Best Viewed with ${browser}" badges. It's purely a pain point for users, for what appears to be merely a battle of egos among the world's richest megacorporations.
Praising the growth of a third CPU opcode system sounds to me like wanting to bring back, say, the Scottish historical units of measurement, on the basis that we're "getting bored" with the SI/USCS duopoly. Bored is good! Bored means it works. I wish the USCS would die off, too, so I could be even more bored in that department.
SPARC has been open for a long time and there are numerous implementations. MIPS (and Longsoon) has been shipping forever. RISC-V is real. There's a project to create a re-implementation of SuperH.
It's not like x86 & ARM is the only thing in the world...it's just the only thing that matters economically right now.
Slimbook has made some excellent hardware in the past, with terrific software support. They're much closer to being the Macbooks of the Linux world than either Purism's or System76's offerings are.
Why is it "incredibly exciting"? Near as I can tell from the web site, it's a relatively very slow processor (~1GHz) with little memory (max 2Gb?). There are other "Open Platform" options with similar limitations (Longsoon).
The only problem is are PowerPC/Linux up to task? Correct if I'm wrong but from what I know the entire linux ecosystem is geared toward X86/64 and if you're on other architecture the selection of software that works shrinks substantially.
While we could just compile everything, there's still the problem of untested architecture integration, bugs that doesn't happen in X86 might happen in PowerPC/ARM and it's not a trivial issue to debug a compiler/bimodal action for instruction sets.
Looks like this is 64-bit but big endian. Weird choice when a) POWER has gone little-endian and b) this a system whose form factor implies running a Web browser and the Web requires little-endian ArrayBuffer behavior these days, so not running on a natively little-endian CPU seems inefficient.
I will be very interested in this when they have a "give money, get laptop" situation set up. I'm glad to see more open hardware and software in the wild.
But you'll have to excuse my skepticism as long as they need to run a fundraiser to get even the basic product together, let alone getting said product to market at a reasonable price for what it is.
I knew a number of companies that had a Waterloo moments after very successful kickstarter campaigns with PCs and smarthones.
Seeing a company making $1m+ on kickstarter, successfully delivering, and then committing big to mass manufacturing only to see single digit orders per day is something I see often in Shenzhen
Yes, the fundraising campaign is for engineering work for a PPC motherboard for an existing laptop chassis.
I would also prefer sending them money in exchange for a physical product, but they're not at that point yet. They're asking for €24,000 which honestly seems a little low to cover the engineering work for an almost completely new laptop MB.
PowerPCs have configurable endianness in the MSR register, but boot into big endian mode by default. macOS used it in big endian mode. Linux I can't speak to but believe you can pick based on kernel build config. As for IBM's OS' or the ones running on consoles, I can't speak to that.
The interesting part is that the motherboard also needs to support the specific endianness chosen, and when running in little-endian mode, it needs to perform a 64-bit byte swap on all data going in or out [1].
Open Firmware Forth Code may be compiled into FCode, a bytecode which is independent of computer architecture details such as the instruction set and memory hierarchy. A PCI card may include a program, compiled to FCode, which runs on any Open Firmware system. In this way, it can provide platform-independent boot-time diagnostics, configuration code, and device drivers. FCode is also very compact, so that a disk driver may require only one or two kilobytes. Therefore, many of the same I/O cards can be used on Sun systems and Macintoshes that used Open Firmware. FCode implements ANS Forth and a subset of the Open Firmware library.
That same Open Firmware Forth system [1], which was developed by Mitch Bradley [2], was not only in the PowerPC Mac bios, but it was originally used for the SparcStation boot roms, and eventually in the OLPC, and it was even an IEEE Standard 1275-1994!
In fact: the Open Firmware boot loader and plug-in card firmware interface technology, commonly used by both Sun and Apple, is the only firmware standard in existence to have its own theme song [3] !!!
: OpenFirmwareSong ( - )
\ By Mitch Bradley.
\ Sung to the tune of "The Flintstones".
𝄞
." Firmware" cr
." Open Firmware" cr
." It's the appropriate technology," cr
." Features" cr
." FCode booting" cr
." Hierarchical DevInfo tree." cr
." Hack Forth" cr
." Using Emacs on the keys," cr
." Save in" cr
." NVRAM if you please." cr
𝄒 cr
." With your" cr
." Open Firmware" cr
." You can fix the bugs in no time" cr
." Bring the kernel up in no time" cr
." We'll have an FCode time!" cr
𝄒 cr
\ Thank you and good night!
reboot
;
Everyone here has made a bunch of great points about this hardware, and massive props to the creators, and to IBM for open-sourcing the CPU. In light of that, this comment might sound a bit "shallow Hal", but... looking at the Slimbook's "Eclipse" case... nothing about that screams "slim".
I'm not sure about power PC, but about 15 years ago I was working on a MIPS based desktop linux system, and there was no way to get adobe flash to run on it, which at the time was a big deal.
Could they have similar issues with media stuff (netflix, hulu etc) on a device like this?
I think Google's Widevine (which is used for a lot of these DRM'd streams) is only available for Chrome. I think we'd need Google to provide a Chrome for PPC binary, which would require them to bundle a WideVine for PPC binary.
Hmm, I wonder if this will be able to run AmigaOS natively.
I've played with Aros a bit but I would love an excuse to play with "real" Amiga running natively, but the current PowerPC offerings for Amiga are obscenely overpriced.
If only IBM had come out with a PowerPC Thinkpad that ran MacOS in 1995 like IBM and Apple jointly promised was the whole point of CHRP: the Common Hardware Reference Platform. But nooooo, they thought all the cool kids wanted to run WARP, aka OS/2, aka "Half an Operating System".
The great thing about the Thinkpads of 24 years ago was that they were so well built and modular and user serviceable that many of them would still be working even now. They were so much more solid and dependable than anything Apple ever produced in their entire history, and especially their shitty PowerPC laptops of that time period. It would have been the perfect Powerbook, but from IBM. But no, IBM and Apple couldn't stomach running Apple software, and Apple couldn't stomach their software running on robust reliable repairable hardware.
>Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) is a standard system architecture for PowerPC-based computer systems published jointly by IBM and Apple in 1995. Like its predecessor PReP, it was conceptualized as a design to allow various operating systems to run on an industry standard hardware platform, and specified the use of Open Firmware and RTAS for machine abstraction purposes. Unlike PReP, CHRP incorporated elements of the Power Macintosh architecture and was intended to support the classic Mac OS and NetWare, in addition to the four operating systems that had been ported to PReP at the time (Windows NT, OS/2, Solaris, and AIX).
>Open Firmware, or OpenBoot in Sun Microsystems parlance, is a standard defining the interfaces of a computer firmware system, formerly endorsed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It originated at Sun, and has been used by Sun, Apple, IBM, ARM and most other non-x86 PCI chipset vendors. Open Firmware allows the system to load platform-independent drivers directly from the PCI card, improving compatibility.
>The name stands for "Operating System/2", because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's "Personal System/2 (PS/2)" line of second-generation personal computers.
IBM should have used this for the OS/2 theme song:
>At the time, IBM was making CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) PowerPC Thinkpads, which nobody could think of anything to do with because all they did was run OS/2, when everybody actually wanted them to run MacOS (but IBM refused to admit that was a good idea). That would have been the best of both worlds, back when Apple and IBM were in bed together (i.e. Kaleida, Taligent).
>CHRP was the Common Hardware Reference Platform for the PowerPC, which IBM and Apple collaborated on. IBM made a CHRP PowerPC Thinkpad that ran OS/2, but out of pride refused to sell one that ran MacOS, which kind of missed the whole point of CHRP. IBM just couldn't imagine why anyone would want to run anything but OS/2 on them.
>I would have loved to have a MacOS powerbook running on wonderful Thinkpad hardware, because Apple's laptop hardware was pretty crappy at the time. It would have been the best of both worlds, but it was never to be.
[+] [-] dragontamer|6 years ago|reply
Since POWER9 only exists in the server / HEDT sphere, I doubt this will be a modern POWER9 chip. Maybe something like a NXP-chip, which would still be interesting. Something on the scale of a Chromebook maybe?
If binaries were compatible with the Talos II POWER9 HEDT / Server, then there is still a good use of this laptop. To serve as a portable development platform, much like Intel Atom can serve as a portable development platform for Intel Xeons.
Depends on a lot of details however. Honestly, its probably more important to rack-up a POWER9 Talos II and just SSH into it every once in a while... modern cloud-based services makes this sort of thing much easier.
----------
EDIT: Site finally worked for me. NXP T2080 chip, 4-core / 8-thread 28nm class chip. e6500 core, which is some form of PowerPC for sure... 128-bit vector units (Altivec). 32kB L1 d$ and 32kB L1 I$, 2MB L2$ for the whole chip.
This is older-tech for sure, definitely "Chromebook" level of tech, maybe a touch weaker even.
EDIT2: I think there's something to be said about an "open" design, where the schematics are available for the community to use and extend. The NXP T2080 has good GPIO pins and connectivity, so there's a chance that this laptop will be easier to interface with electronically than other devices. Guys over at hackaday probably would love something like this. https://gitlab.com/oshw-powerpc-notebook/powerpc-laptop-mobo...
[+] [-] kjs3|6 years ago|reply
If I followed the links correctly, it's a 1GHz-ish PPC derivative from a shop you for whom processors are a minor part of their product line. The motherboards linked to appear to all top out at 2GB of SoDIMM memory. So maybe "that's cool" but not "that's generally useful" and personally not "I'll spend money on that".
[+] [-] filmgirlcw|6 years ago|reply
I’m not discounting the effort that goes into place here — at least I’m trying not to — but like, why would anyone look at PowerPC for portables in 2019 when the whole reason Apple shifted to Intel 14 years ago was thermals? Wouldn’t ARM be better?
I’m sure I’m missing something but I just don’t understand this on any level except for some obsession with “openness” at the expense of actually doing anything.
[+] [-] pgeorgi|6 years ago|reply
The move to Intel wasn't because the instruction set is, for some reason, superior (it isn't), it's because IBM couldn't keep up with Intel's fabrication technology. The G5 chip from 2002 was at 130nm, while the Intel design introduced in 2006 (when 4 year old G5 was the best IBM had to offer) was at 65nm.
The chip they aim for is built on a 28nm process (which has some impact on voltages used and minimum conversion of power into heat). That's definitely not top-class, but good enough: it's about a factor 3 to the state of the art (compared to factor 2 between G5 and Intel Core in 2006), but in absolute terms it's so much closer.
There are enough ARM laptops out there, this provides another venue for more vendor independence (ARM still exerts tight control over its ISA while PowerPC is a close cousin to Power9 which was opened recently). In short, for a project like this, the goal isn't the very best performance on the market, it's "the more the merrier".
[+] [-] skunkworker|6 years ago|reply
Edit: I've toured that lab before, and saw the iMac G5 facedown on a table before it was released ( I didn't know what I was looking at, at the time)
[+] [-] lonelappde|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frabert|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tenebrisalietum|6 years ago|reply
This is assuming royalties don't have to be paid to an ISA creator, which is a separate issue.
A single ISA doesn't have to mean there is a single CPU vendor or CPU manufacturer.
[+] [-] ken|6 years ago|reply
I think it's great that many companies have their own implementation of open standards like Unicode, TCP/IP, and SMTP. Life was worse in every way when every company had their own special encodings for text files, and their own proprietary network protocols. I can type some text in Japanese and email it to a friend, in 2019, and it will just work. Excellent!
The continued survival of x86 and other proprietary instruction sets reeks to me of the days of the "Best Viewed with ${browser}" badges. It's purely a pain point for users, for what appears to be merely a battle of egos among the world's richest megacorporations.
Praising the growth of a third CPU opcode system sounds to me like wanting to bring back, say, the Scottish historical units of measurement, on the basis that we're "getting bored" with the SI/USCS duopoly. Bored is good! Bored means it works. I wish the USCS would die off, too, so I could be even more bored in that department.
[+] [-] kjs3|6 years ago|reply
It's not like x86 & ARM is the only thing in the world...it's just the only thing that matters economically right now.
[+] [-] katmannthree|6 years ago|reply
Slimbook has made some excellent hardware in the past, with terrific software support. They're much closer to being the Macbooks of the Linux world than either Purism's or System76's offerings are.
[+] [-] kjs3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aperocky|6 years ago|reply
While we could just compile everything, there's still the problem of untested architecture integration, bugs that doesn't happen in X86 might happen in PowerPC/ARM and it's not a trivial issue to debug a compiler/bimodal action for instruction sets.
[+] [-] hsivonen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Endy|6 years ago|reply
But you'll have to excuse my skepticism as long as they need to run a fundraiser to get even the basic product together, let alone getting said product to market at a reasonable price for what it is.
[+] [-] baybal2|6 years ago|reply
I knew a number of companies that had a Waterloo moments after very successful kickstarter campaigns with PCs and smarthones.
Seeing a company making $1m+ on kickstarter, successfully delivering, and then committing big to mass manufacturing only to see single digit orders per day is something I see often in Shenzhen
[+] [-] Gregordinary|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kop316|6 years ago|reply
I would be far more interested to fund it if I knew I was getting a laptop, but as far as I can tell, that's not the case.
[+] [-] katmannthree|6 years ago|reply
I would also prefer sending them money in exchange for a physical product, but they're not at that point yet. They're asking for €24,000 which honestly seems a little low to cover the engineering work for an almost completely new laptop MB.
[+] [-] tyingq|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arcticbull|6 years ago|reply
The interesting part is that the motherboard also needs to support the specific endianness chosen, and when running in little-endian mode, it needs to perform a 64-bit byte swap on all data going in or out [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC#Endian_modes
[+] [-] ken|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hsivonen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unixhero|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonHopkins|6 years ago|reply
https://web.archive.org/web/20070204145613/http://playground...
https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867724
OpenFirmware uses architecture independent FORTH byte code, so peripheral cards can include machine independent drivers and diagnostics!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware
Open Firmware Forth Code may be compiled into FCode, a bytecode which is independent of computer architecture details such as the instruction set and memory hierarchy. A PCI card may include a program, compiled to FCode, which runs on any Open Firmware system. In this way, it can provide platform-independent boot-time diagnostics, configuration code, and device drivers. FCode is also very compact, so that a disk driver may require only one or two kilobytes. Therefore, many of the same I/O cards can be used on Sun systems and Macintoshes that used Open Firmware. FCode implements ANS Forth and a subset of the Open Firmware library.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9844026
That same Open Firmware Forth system [1], which was developed by Mitch Bradley [2], was not only in the PowerPC Mac bios, but it was originally used for the SparcStation boot roms, and eventually in the OLPC, and it was even an IEEE Standard 1275-1994!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Bradley
In fact: the Open Firmware boot loader and plug-in card firmware interface technology, commonly used by both Sun and Apple, is the only firmware standard in existence to have its own theme song [3] !!!
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20070204145613/http://playground...
[+] [-] tengbretson|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phs318u|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] locusofself|6 years ago|reply
Could they have similar issues with media stuff (netflix, hulu etc) on a device like this?
[+] [-] cmiles74|6 years ago|reply
https://www.widevine.com/
[+] [-] tombert|6 years ago|reply
I've played with Aros a bit but I would love an excuse to play with "real" Amiga running natively, but the current PowerPC offerings for Amiga are obscenely overpriced.
[+] [-] jug|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakeogh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geoffreyhale|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lonelappde|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonHopkins|6 years ago|reply
1) Is it really a such great idea to give a product a name that is so rich in potential for satire and parody?
2) Does it come in green?
[+] [-] DonHopkins|6 years ago|reply
The great thing about the Thinkpads of 24 years ago was that they were so well built and modular and user serviceable that many of them would still be working even now. They were so much more solid and dependable than anything Apple ever produced in their entire history, and especially their shitty PowerPC laptops of that time period. It would have been the perfect Powerbook, but from IBM. But no, IBM and Apple couldn't stomach running Apple software, and Apple couldn't stomach their software running on robust reliable repairable hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_Plat...
>Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) is a standard system architecture for PowerPC-based computer systems published jointly by IBM and Apple in 1995. Like its predecessor PReP, it was conceptualized as a design to allow various operating systems to run on an industry standard hardware platform, and specified the use of Open Firmware and RTAS for machine abstraction purposes. Unlike PReP, CHRP incorporated elements of the Power Macintosh architecture and was intended to support the classic Mac OS and NetWare, in addition to the four operating systems that had been ported to PReP at the time (Windows NT, OS/2, Solaris, and AIX).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware
>Open Firmware, or OpenBoot in Sun Microsystems parlance, is a standard defining the interfaces of a computer firmware system, formerly endorsed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It originated at Sun, and has been used by Sun, Apple, IBM, ARM and most other non-x86 PCI chipset vendors. Open Firmware allows the system to load platform-independent drivers directly from the PCI card, improving compatibility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2
>The name stands for "Operating System/2", because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's "Personal System/2 (PS/2)" line of second-generation personal computers.
IBM should have used this for the OS/2 theme song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ_03vnjJkA
My previous comments on CHRP:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438823
>At the time, IBM was making CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform) PowerPC Thinkpads, which nobody could think of anything to do with because all they did was run OS/2, when everybody actually wanted them to run MacOS (but IBM refused to admit that was a good idea). That would have been the best of both worlds, back when Apple and IBM were in bed together (i.e. Kaleida, Taligent).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18393341
>CHRP was the Common Hardware Reference Platform for the PowerPC, which IBM and Apple collaborated on. IBM made a CHRP PowerPC Thinkpad that ran OS/2, but out of pride refused to sell one that ran MacOS, which kind of missed the whole point of CHRP. IBM just couldn't imagine why anyone would want to run anything but OS/2 on them.
>I would have loved to have a MacOS powerbook running on wonderful Thinkpad hardware, because Apple's laptop hardware was pretty crappy at the time. It would have been the best of both worlds, but it was never to be.
[+] [-] coldnose|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pier25|6 years ago|reply