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IBM Drops The "Silliness" - POWERXX Is Indeed POWER10 With Updated Open-Source Patches

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  • IBM Drops The "Silliness" - POWERXX Is Indeed POWER10 With Updated Open-Source Patches

    Phoronix: IBM Drops The "Silliness" - POWERXX Is Indeed POWER10 With Updated Open-Source Patches

    Over the past year IBM engineers have been plumbing "future" processor support into the GCC compiler and related GNU toolchain components. The patches often referred to the work either as "future" or "powerxx" while today is christened as what was pretty much obvious all along: it's POWER10...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Good ole staid IBM. At least they didn't jump on the "X" bandwagon with "POWER X" like a couple of others I might mention. Powerxx really did just mean two unknown integers after "power".

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    • #3
      Well, at least we can expect strong support from Fedora. Even as Fedora devs will storm the web forums to proclaim "we are a totally separate company from IBM! We never talk to IBM people!"

      But, this will be a good thing for Power and for Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS, despite the verbal shenanigans. We have really good, open hardware systems available right now from Raptor at a decent price, but the the distro and graphics driver support was lagging last time I did any research. RedHat being owned by IBM should make a big difference in that regard.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by andyprough View Post
        Well, at least we can expect strong support from Fedora.
        The Power (and s/390) architecture has had (very) strong support from RedHat for a very long time. I would be surprised to see that change.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by stormcrow View Post
          Good ole staid IBM.
          Perhaps IBM needs to use internal code names for their products to make life easier for marketing.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by CommunityMember View Post

            The Power (and s/390) architecture has had (very) strong support from RedHat for a very long time. I would be surprised to see that change.
            Yes as a server, but as a desktop it's been lagging, needing a lot of workarounds. Maybe it's improved the past few months, not sure. I was looking into buying a Blackbird board from Raptor last year, but the graphics card issues and lack of software support for basics like a good web browser made me lose interest. If I drop that much money I want a fully functional system, not a tinkering hobby project with hit-or-miss graphics support.

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            • #7
              I haven't seen any firm commitments of IBM to improve POWER support on the desktop. And as long as it stays this way their ISA will remain absent in that market. I respect the work of Raptor improving things a little, but they simply lack the resources only IBM and friends could provide. And there might be an opportunity here as ARM opens the door for ISA-agnostic development for major software components during the next couple of years with both Microsoft and Apple supporting another ISA (hopefully getting rid of hidden x86-isms in a lot of codebases).

              X86 got that dominant in the server space because the architecture was familiar to software developers and the widespread use in desktop systems. ARM tries to leverage its dominance in mobile to make an attack on the desktop and the server space soon enough. With Red Hat IBM could improve the integration of Linux with their hardware and let's wait and see what fruits this will show in the future.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by andyprough View Post
                Well, at least we can expect strong support from Fedora. Even as Fedora devs will storm the web forums to proclaim "we are a totally separate company from IBM! We never talk to IBM people!"

                But, this will be a good thing for Power and for Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS, despite the verbal shenanigans. We have really good, open hardware systems available right now from Raptor at a decent price, but the the distro and graphics driver support was lagging last time I did any research. RedHat being owned by IBM should make a big difference in that regard.
                Doubt it. IBM didn’t need To buy RedHat to support S/390 nor POWER. They’ve been doing that first party in house for nearly 20 years. Buying RedHat just gave them first party control over the rest of the support stack in user space.

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                • #9
                  Super old joke. If IBM invented sushi they would've called it "dead fish with cold rice".

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                  • #10
                    IBM does a similar thing with their z architecture. Everyone knew that after "z14" they were going to call their next revision "z15". But they used "arch13" as the code name for quite a long time while upstreaming support.
                    Last edited by Space Heater; 11 May 2020, 11:55 PM.

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