LibreSOC Still Striving To Produce An Open-Source Hybrid CPU/GPU Built On OpenPOWER

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LibreSOC Still Striving To Produce An Open-Source Hybrid CPU/GPU Built On OpenPOWER

LibreSOC remains the very ambitious project of creating a fully open-source hybrid CPU/GPU SoC but with a very uphill battle still in front of them...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreSOC-2021

[kvuj]

Oh boy, RISC-V requires NDAs? ouch.

Guess POWER CPUs are looking better than ever. I might pick up a raptor system when P10 drops. So many cool features + I might take a look at the firmware just to see the boot sequence of a modern CPU.

[tildearrow]

Hybrid CPU/GPU? Considering open hardware only achieved 720p25 a few years ago, this will be a challenge...

[hiryu]

Oh boy, RISC-V requires NDAs? ouch.

Guess POWER CPUs are looking better than ever. I might pick up a raptor system when P10 drops. So many cool features + I might take a look at the firmware just to see the boot sequence of a modern CPU.

Alas, POWER10 may not be happening at least as far as Raptor's hardware goes:

https://twitter.com/raptorcompsys/status/1295364416469377026?lang=en

Hopefully these issues will be resolved or P11 won't have any problems and won't take too long.

I *REALLY* hope the P10 stuff is resolved. I have 2 P9 boxes and I absolutely love them.

[hiryu]

I like what these people are doing, but I don't see a way for an individual to donate $. But maybe it's because I just woke up?

In any case, I'd definitely like to purchase an open source PowerPC based system from them in the future.

[tuxd3v]

I like what these people are doing, but I don't see a way for an individual to donate $. But maybe it's because I just woke up?

In any case, I'd definitely like to purchase an open source PowerPC based system from them in the future.

I am waiting for the Powerpc laptop:

https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/campaigns/donation-campaign-for-production-of-five-working-prototypes/

[OneTimeShot]

Why are we still talking about this? That RISC-V people told this project they wanted nothing to do with it has nothing to do with NDAs, everything to do with the project being one step better than a scam.

You don't "base a GPU architecture on Power or RISC-V". You need to design a GPU instruction set.

All this project is doing is running Mesa LLVM Pipe on a chip and trying to add some custom instructions to improve the dire performance. It isn't going to work.

[CommunityMember]

Oh boy, RISC-V requires NDAs? ouch.

The ISA is open and royalty free, but one has to be a member to participate in certain functions (including the process of extensions), which requires an NDA. And an organization such as LibreSOC that is looking to extend the architecture potentially by adding accelerators or new instructions therefore typically needs to be a member, and therefore under certain NDA restrictions.

[OneTimeShot]

The ISA is open and royalty free, but one has to be a member to participate in certain functions (including the process of extensions), which requires an NDA.

This is true, but not relevant here. LibeSOC had no extensions to add (although maybe at some point they would have). The NDA isn't required to design extensions, only to go through the RISC-V standardisation process when dealing with other companies. As no sane company would entertain running a software 3D renderer on a CPU, the NDA to work with others is beside the point.

I can almost guarantee you that what actually happened is that someone at RISC pointed out this project was a bad idea, so LibreSOC had a temper tantrum and has been spreading FUD about all of RISC-V ever since...

[kvuj]

I have 2 P9 boxes and I absolutely love them.

Do you think glibc 2.33 will have a significant impact on performance considering the new POWER9 hwcaps?

It's interesting seeing such a niche CPU with such an active developer community. Perks of using server grade CPUs I guess