[HN Gopher] GNU/Linux Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook Project
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GNU/Linux Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook Project
Author : type0
Score : 50 points
Date : 2021-09-18 17:58 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.powerpc-notebook.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.powerpc-notebook.org)
| [deleted]
| quanticle wrote:
| Using PPC in a laptop form factor is a really confusing choice,
| given that Apple abandoned PPC [1] in their laptops for Intel
| because they judged that there was no way that IBM was ever going
| to come out with a PPC chip that was ever going to be as power
| efficient as the comparable Intel parts. Their "Why PPC" page [2]
| makes no mention of power or thermal efficiency, and just states
| that PowerPC is better because the original version of the ISA
| was invented after x86 and ARM. By that logic Itanium is the best
| ISA of all!
|
| [1] https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/opinion-
| technol...
|
| [2] https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/why-powerpc/
| lrvick wrote:
| Many, myself included, would gladly take a major hit in battery
| life if it means having a machine we can actually trust.
|
| Trust means no ME backdoors, no random blobs which can be
| supply chain attack vectors.
|
| Freedom means I can do anything I want to the software and
| firmware and repair anything as needed long term without the
| consent of a corporation that has a financial interest in
| seeing their hardware go to a landfill in 2 years so people buy
| the latest.
| neilv wrote:
| How does the open/libre/trustworthy _potential_ of PPC and
| Power products compare with RISC-V? Current, and near future?
|
| This is something I've been wondering. It's started looking
| like there will be a lot more hardware options based on
| RISC-V. Thus far, PPC/Power has had better libre options due
| to: https://www.raptorcs.com/ I hope there will be healthy
| competition from open/libre/trustworthy and performant RISC-V
| boards.
| [deleted]
| guerrilla wrote:
| > open/libre/trustworthy potential
|
| It's not just potential but actual: Those Raptor
| workstations and servers already have coreboot firmware and
| run Linux (and whatever BSDs run on PPC today.)
| neilv wrote:
| Agreed for _current_ , over recent years. But what about
| _near-future_ , with multiple sources of performant
| RISC-V CPUs? And will a larger variety of boards follow,
| possibly including very libre ones like Raptor does for
| Power?
| heeeman wrote:
| They are not aiming for the "ultrabook" form factor, but rather
| the mobile workstation form factor.
|
| According to the leaflet from NXP, the CPU has a "typical"
| power consumption of ~15W - if that means under load, it would
| be in the ballpark of Intel and AMD mobile CPUs, as far as I
| understand.
| pigeons wrote:
| Because Open hardware.
| autoliteInline wrote:
| I figure someone might as well go whole-hog on that and build
| a PC with just a big ol' FPGA.
| flatiron wrote:
| Fpgas are very unsuitable general purpose computers. De10
| nano is a very beefy fpga and can barely play doom acting
| like a general purpose 486 and lacks a fpga
| autoliteInline wrote:
| Oh well, I figured that a PowerPC Notebook was for
| hobbyists.
|
| What I would find fascinating is to think about languages
| and OSs for FPGA and try to break loose from the utterly
| boring C/Unix/68k,x86,MIPS,blah paradigm. Having
| something turnkey with attachment to various ports and a
| display would be kind of cool. Maybe that exists already.
|
| I worked on a project with a processor-on-an-FPGA and
| while it wasn't fast, the video codec in FPGA made it
| useful. Kind of a neat thing I think.
| flatiron wrote:
| Ppc notebook is a thing because ppc has been "open
| sourced" so you can just make ppc chips using great
| documentation with nobody knocking on your door. As a
| technology it's dead as a door nail but it's free as
| speech.
| lrvick wrote:
| That is being done too for when trust REALLY matters.
|
| See the Precursor.
| _ph_ wrote:
| I wouldn't think that PowerPC is ill suited for reasonably low
| power designs. It is a RISC chip after all. And up to and
| including the G4, they ran very well in the Apple laptops. Only
| the IBM-made G5 was a very hot beast, perhaps because it pushed
| the cpu frequency beyond the comfort zone for its process in
| the attempt to keep up with Intel. But a fresh design with a
| modern process could yield very low power and still well
| performing chips. Even the Itanium, which had a reputation for
| being power-hungry probably would be efficient enough to be
| used in a smart phone, if ported to the TSMC 7nm technology.
| duskwuff wrote:
| What's even more confusing is their choice of parts. The NXP
| QorIQ line is designed for use in networking hardware, not in
| mobile devices -- it has limited power management
| functionality, and, as best I was able to tell when I looked
| into this last year [2], has _idle_ power consumption somewhere
| around 7W, ramping up to 20W under load. It 's not especially
| fast, either -- it's only got four cores at 1.8 GHz. Most new
| cell phones will run rings around it.
|
| My best guess is that they somehow decided on the PowerPC
| architecture before evaluating what parts were available, and
| realized too late that nobody makes mobile PowerPC SoCs...
|
| [1]: https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-
| microcontrollers...
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188796
| zeckalpha wrote:
| Apple has since moved off of x86 for similar reasons. The issue
| is the fab process more than the architecture.
| ronsor wrote:
| I hope it's not big endian. A lot of modern software now just
| expects everything to be little endian, and won't work properly.
| johnklos wrote:
| Yeah! Let's not fix the software and the bad assumptions some
| programmers make - let's all just do what's simplest for the
| bad programmers. What could go wrong? ;)
|
| Seriously, there's zero reason why endianness should matter in
| code. All good code compiles and runs on whatever endian system
| you want. If it doesn't, then it's buggy and broken and should
| be fixed, and whoever wrote it should be ashamed.
| jayd16 wrote:
| >Seriously, there's zero reason why endianness should matter
| in code
|
| How about wanting to share binary blobs between architectures
| without spending the effort to marshal things.
| userbinator wrote:
| Big endian is backwards. Little endian is logical and
| should've been the only choice from the beginning.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9451284
|
| The only real BE holdouts are networking hardware and
| mainframes.
| spijdar wrote:
| I agree with this in principle, that good code should be
| endian neutral, but if the goal of the project is to produce
| something that's broadly useful as a "real laptop" then this
| is a serious concern, as a _lot_ of software is either bugged
| or straight up broken on big endian.
|
| Fixing all the broken software and making all of GNU/Linux
| bug-free is a noble cause, and one FOSS contributors all want
| I'm sure, but people who are interested should know just how
| much software is broken on BE. It's not a tiny handful of
| packages. It's not a ton either, FWIW, but the broken
| packages tend to be the larger, more complex application
| software that IMO your average end user will want, especially
| if you're marketing this laptop for general users and not
| specifically to programmers or others willing to compromise
| on software.
|
| It's not an insurmountable challenge, especially 64-bit PPC
| which works okay in BE, as there are enough diehard PPC64
| users keeping the patches flowing to keep it working. But
| some things will never work without incredible porting
| efforts, and some of the things that work have issues.
| monocasa wrote:
| PowerPC has been settling on powerpc64le lately for that
| reason. Is be surprised if little endian isn't at least an
| option, if not the default.
| spijdar wrote:
| Unfortunately the SoC they've chosen, while technically
| supporting little endian, doesn't include the VMX extensions
| to the ISA IIRC, which all (?) distros require as they
| generally assume ppc64le = POWER8 or higher, which include
| VMX. There may be other caveats, but at the very least, you'd
| need a custom distro to get LE working on it, with special
| build flags used to restrict it to Altivec instructions.
| monocasa wrote:
| Everything I'm looking at says that the T2080 SoC they've
| chosen contains e6500 CPU cores, which contain VMX units
| (also known as AltiVec). Unless you're talking about later
| additions to the VMX ISA, and not the VMX unit wholesale.
|
| I'm also seeing the e6500 listed as Power 2.06 compliant,
| just the same as POWER8.
|
| AltiVec is just NXP's (nee Freescale's nee Motorola's)
| trademark for VMX just like Velocity Engine is Apple's
| trademark.
| spijdar wrote:
| I was mistaken, but the end result is the same. It's VSX
| that's POWER7 and higher specific, which is an extension
| of VMX/Altivec.
|
| The reality is actually worse -- Altivec/VMX doesn't work
| at all in little-endian on the e6500.
| https://www.nxp.com/files-
| static/training/doc/ftf/2014/FTF-N... (search for "big-
| endian")
|
| So an LE distro for the e6500 would have to built with
| Altivec support disabled.
|
| (The powerpc notebook guys mention this in their FAQ, but
| sort of vaguely says that modern distros require "some
| functionality" not provided by the e6500
| https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/faq/)
| Y_Y wrote:
| That website is a trainwreck on mobile firefox. Two screen-
| covering popups and wrong language detection.
| csilverman wrote:
| Agreed. They've disabled reader mode, too. Took one look at
| that mess and decided I didn't care enough to even try tapping
| the deliberately minuscule X buttons.
|
| I'm at the point where I am so done with disrespectful websites
| that I'm willing to forgo information I'd otherwise care about
| just so I don't have to engage with them.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| Same on Safari. That's not how one should do it in 2021...
|
| Welp, I'll just skip the article then.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Three popups on desktop, one of which collapses into a large,
| persistent "chat" bubble in the upper left of the window.
|
| Not to judge a book by its cover, but this certainly doesn't
| speak well for the level of care put into this project.
| threshold wrote:
| These guys can't design a website I'm not giving them money to
| build a laptop. And why PowerPC? And if they have prototypes
| coming in October where are the photos? Not one photo of a PCB.
| This is vaporware.
| jrururufuf666 wrote:
| cant donate in crypto, too bad
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(page generated 2021-09-18 23:00 UTC)