IBM Power11 CPUs Launching In 2025 - Linux 6.13 Preps KVM Nested Guests For Power11

[coder]

Then why would Linus even mention testing for big endian at all?

Because Linux still officially supports plenty of Big Endian CPUs. As long as it supports any, the kernel should be written and tested to properly work on both endians.

[coder]

What he said is not true

Do you run a Big Endian distro?

Linus cares to not do a half assed shitty job.

What I said applies to the end user experience, which includes all of the userspace. Linus isn't in charge of that. Even if Linus ensures the kernel has no big endian-specific bugs, most of the code running on a Linux box is userspace stuff that's outside his purview.

[coder]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) offers big endian and little endian variants for IBM Power Systems servers:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM/Z is big endian.

No, those don't use POWER ISA.

[ilgazcl]

You must have been living under a rock for 20 years.

IBM, you know the company that actually produces the ISA and the CPUs.

Steve Jobs, the PR genius, caused great harm to PowerPC consumer/public image. What he meant was, IBM completely ignored Apple's specific needs and they broke their promise of higher Mhz G5. Nothing more. The CPU isn't fit to mobile, simple as that. Otherwise, they passed 5ghz a couple of years later with a new generation. I remember submitting that news to slashdot at that time.

Apple did the same thing again, to Intel. Public seem to figure how hot/power consuming Intel is right after their M1 switch.

[coder]

Apple did the same thing again, to Intel. Public seem to figure how hot/power consuming Intel is right after their M1 switch.

Oh, c'mon! That wasn't Apple's fault. Intel had been steadily increasing TDPs since Skylake! The year Apple launched M1 was also the year of Intel's Rocket Lake. Their mobile CPU of the time was Tiger Lake, which was basically a higher-clocking version of Ice Lake and not terribly efficient, either.

[NeoMorpheus]

Steve Jobs, the PR genius, caused great harm to PowerPC consumer/public image. What he meant was, IBM completely ignored Apple's specific needs and they broke their promise of higher Mhz G5. Nothing more. The CPU isn't fit to mobile, simple as that. Otherwise, they passed 5ghz a couple of years later with a new generation. I remember submitting that news to slashdot at that time.

Apple did the same thing again, to Intel. Public seem to figure how hot/power consuming Intel is right after their M1 switch.

Motorola was supposed to take care of the mobile chips, but bailed.

Apple was supposed to make Mac OS compatible with all PowerPC computers, not just theirs, even though they eventually offered it during the clones era.

Jobs killed the clones.

Atari and Commodore died before jumping to PowerPC.

IBM sabotaged OS/2.

Win NT ran on PPC but not the x86 software so it was useless.

So by the time that Jobs was pushing PPC, they were the only ones and they simply didn’t offered a compelling volume for IBM to keep investing in the mobile chips, which as stated, motorola had already abandoned.

The rest is history or so it goes.

Please note that i typed all that from memory, so it could be wrong in places.

[Developer12]

And Solid Silicon is supposed to release their POWER CPU's in 2025... There was conjecture that the upcoming Solid Silicon CPU's would basically be based on the POWER10... but given the timing, I suspect they'll be POWER11 based. Solid Silicon has been extremely tight lipped about their upcoming release though so this is just conjecture on my part.

They're not ANYTHING based. Their CPUs are a from-scratch implementation of the OpenPOWER sepc.

They're also likely vaporware, but that's an entirely separate issue.

[Developer12]

I wasn't aware that the PowerPC was still being developed. I thought when it was dropped by Apple it went away, but that just goes to show how much I (don't) know

Does anyone know who still uses them? I did a quick internet search and couldn't find much about them.

This isn't PowerPC. PowerPC is a shitty clone of the POWER architecture that was mixed with sawdust and pond water to make something cheap enough for apple to sell to the average joe. It failed miserably because motorola sucked at making chips.

POWER is used by tons of large enterprises with needs too big for x86 shitboxes from amd/intel but to small to justify the cost of a Z-arch mainframe. This is firmly in the territory of "if you need to ask, you can't afford it, but if you need it, nothing else will do the job."

POWER chips tend to come out only every 5 years or so, but typically leapfrog whatever amd/intel have by at least 3-4. It almost always is a full generation ahead on PCIe and either is a full generation ahead on DDR or has a faster bespoke memory system like OMI. Many POWER features and capabilities never find their way into everyday x86 server chips. eg. POWER has supported 4-way SMT (or even 8-way SMT) for several generations now, while AMD has only started to flirt with 4-way.

[Developer12]

Amigas have been using PowerPC for decades. 68k systems are the older Amigas.

As if Amiga the company wasn't dead.

[coder]

Motorola was supposed to take care of the mobile chips, but bailed.

LOL, the mobile problem was indeed solved, but by P.A. Semi. However, it came too late. When Jobs bought them, he had already charted his course with Arm.

https://vita.militaryembedded.com/2885-p-processor-ever-designed/

Win NT ran on PPC but not the x86 software so it was useless.

I'm pretty sure there were emulators, though. I saw Windows NT running on a DEC Alpha and I thought I also saw x86 software running on it under emulation.