A POWER'ful Announcement Is Expected Tomorrow Changing The Open-Source Landscape

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A POWER'ful Announcement Is Expected Tomorrow Changing The Open-Source Landscape

For those interested in IBM's POWER architecture and/or open-source hardware prospects, an industry-shaking announcement is expected to happen Tuesday morning...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Powerful-POWER-Tomorrow

[Lycanthropist]

I really hope they'll announce a POWER platform that is price/performance competitive with amd64. Other than that I can't image anything else that might be big news.

[kpedersen]

Perhaps... AIX has been open-sourced. We will finally be able to get our hands on smitty!

More likely they have sold it to a (chinese?) company who will gut the POWER architecture, putting a few of the innovations into a niche domain specific chip and it will disappear forever.

Oh, the anticipation!

[cipri]

After RISC-V gained traction, started improving their license or going open source.
For me, there is no other way than RISC-V.
And if Huawei open sources HarmonyOS, and if it is indeed that great like it is told to be, then, I have my future computer: HarmonyOS running on a RISC-V machine.

cipri

[pegasus]

POWER to the people ... or something along these lines?

[M@GOid]

Opensource hardware at modern CPU level, with billions of tiny transistors, is something that looks great in theory, but at last to me is meaningless in practical terms.

The problem is that while you can review the code, the circuitry on the chip can only the audited by a selected few, if that. So you will always have to thrust the hardware vendor, not matter how open they claim it to be.

[ms178]

As IBM took over Red Hat recently, I can think of a Linux on POWER initiative, something like Clear Linux for POWER. But that alone wouldn't be that Earth shattering, so I think they might enter the laptop/desktop market again?!

[numacross]

It's probably POWER10 on Samsung's 7nm which would fit their roadmap ("7nm" is sort-of a marketing term for 10nm-class).

[zxy_thf]

I really hope they'll announce a POWER platform that is price/performance competitive with amd64. Other than that I can't image anything else that might be big news.

Totally agree. POWER system is not very reachable/affordable compared with other architectures. An NUC-like blob-free POWER system would be amazing for hobbyists (or paranoids like me ).

[kpedersen]

so I think they might enter the laptop/desktop market again?!

As much as I am hoping they will bring back the IBM Thinkpad; this announcement is about POWER chips and I don't think those things should really go anywhere near a laptop! Yes, desktops would be very interesting though!