Raptor Launching Talos II Lite POWER9 Computer System At A Lower Cost

[coder]

Presumably the same would happen as when you cast an int64 to an int32: the most significant bits will be cut off.

I don't have any truly authoritative links to post, but my limited web research clearly suggests that the effect of pointer casting will change, based on endianness.

[chithanh]

Presumably the same would happen as when you cast an int64 to an int32: the most significant bits will be cut off.

[coder]

Linux distros traditionally have ppc64 big endian ports.
More recently, ppc64le support has been added to a couple of distros and is mostly working. I think Debian/Ubuntu already have ppc64le images for download.

Thanks. I have more confidence in little endian, since that's what x86 uses, as well as Android on ARM.

TBH, I don't even know what happens when you cast a native word-sized pointer to pointer to a smaller type, on big endian machines. My intuition says it's going to be pointing at the most-significant part of the word, but maybe the compiler will offset it? I can just imagine things like that breaking a lot of code - especially as fewer and fewer programmers have to deal with big endian, these days.

[chithanh]

It's the SAS controller. Sadly the associated PCIe controller is locked into a fixed configuration of x8 and x8 in silicon.

Bummer. Thanks for the answering my questions though.

So, I guess what does Ubuntu for Power use (since that's what I'd probably run)?

Do any popular Linux distros (i.e. for Power) differ, in this regard?

Linux distros traditionally have ppc64 big endian ports.
More recently, ppc64le support has been added to a couple of distros and is mostly working. I think Debian/Ubuntu already have ppc64le images for download.

[coder]

It's configurable at runtime. You can literally have LE VMs running on a BE host, or vice versa.

So, I guess what does Ubuntu for Power use (since that's what I'd probably run)?

Do any popular Linux distros (i.e. for Power) differ, in this regard?

[mongo]

Does anyone have benchmarks on quad precision floats compared to say quadmath?

I have a use case that could benefit from increased precision on intermediate calculations but haven't found anything.

[madscientist159]

Does anyone know whether Linux on POWER uses little endian or big endian?

PowerPC is the only reason I was ever tempted to get a Mac, which became a very plausible option after the switch to the BSD-derived OS X. In the end, I found I couldn't stomach the inflated hardware prices and lack of upgradability.

It's configurable at runtime. You can literally have LE VMs running on a BE host, or vice versa.

[coder]

Does anyone know whether Linux on POWER uses little endian or big endian?

PowerPC is the only reason I was ever tempted to get a Mac, which became a very plausible option after the switch to the BSD-derived OS X. In the end, I found I couldn't stomach the inflated hardware prices and lack of upgradability.

[grok]

Geforce GT710 is a PCIe 8x card which should get you going, it does three monitors. It has low specifications, uses 19W.

[starshipeleven]

You are free to consider mechanical hard drives or usb flash drives as a viable alternative in a 3000$+ workstation, I don't.

You missed the point by a few miles, every block device from mechanical drives to crappy micro-sd cards has a controller running a firmware anyway.

Only way to not have a firmware in the storage system at the moment is to access raw flash over some crappy embedded bus like SPI.

For the future it might be possible by using "Open Channel SSDs", are NVMe SSDs where the controller is much dumber than on normal SSDs (it is mostly acting as a bridge to expose the raw flash over PCIe, so you can have good performance) and most of the smart jobs are dealt with by the host CPU, which Linux can deal with since kernel 4.4.

I've seen articles about prototypes for that hardware, but the technology is squarely aimed at datacenter usage for now.

Afaik the only "product" with that technology is a jack-of-all-trades enterprise SSD with a controller that can go in "open channel mode" https://rockylim92.github.io/researc...annelSSD_tips/ (and has 10GB ethernet capabilities so they can create their own storage network with others of the same kind if you want to go that route)