IBM Begins Posting "PowerPC Future" Compiler Patches For What Is Likely Going To Be POWER11

[phoronix]

Phoronix: IBM Begins Posting "PowerPC Future" Compiler Patches For What Is Likely Going To Be POWER11

Just as IBM was posting "future" processor compiler patches in 2019 for what ended up being early POWER10 enablement, they are once again repeating their same compiler enablement technique with sending out "PowerPC future" patches for what is likely to be POWER11...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-PowerPC-Future-POWER11

[tildearrow]

What? How is the architecture not defunct yet?

[blendingsentinel]

What? How is the architecture not defunct yet?

Look up IBM Open PPC64LE. It's still very relevant just like Sun-Oracle & Fujitsu SPARC.

[Min1123]

It's a really good architecture, but it doesn't make IBM as much money as leasing other things, so they make one, then it just kinda sits in obscurity, even against their own offerings. I'm still hoping for libre-soc to take the ball out of IBMs hands.

[timofonic]

What? How is the architecture not defunct yet?

I was going to reply the same. POWER(PC) seems dead outside IBM.

[jabl]

What? How is the architecture not defunct yet?

Hard to see it used for new projects starting from a clean sheet, however there's the legacy market for not only their Unix servers running AIX, but IIRC the POWER chips are also used in the AS/400 (iSeries or whatever it's called this week).

[Dawn]

What? How is the architecture not defunct yet?

Because IBM makes billions of dollars per year selling Power hardware? Z at this point is bigger, but Power isn't small.

There's three big reasons to run Power.

• Support for legacy operating systems, especially i, the operating system formerly known as OS/400 - which has a large customer base and is emphatically not UNIX, making migrations difficult (and it still picks up greenfield customers every year);
• Very high scalability and memory bandwidth - 16 sockets with over 400GB/s of memory bandwidth per socket;
• Very high "per-core" (there's some nuance to this, but it's not relevant right now) performance, which is a big deal on per-core licensed software (ie, a large percentage of enterprise middleware apps.)

There is also Power use outside of IBM, especially the MPC5600/MPC5700 processors for cars from NXP and the licensed variants from ST, though both are slowly moving those product lines to ARM.

[kylew77]

What? How is the architecture not defunct yet?

Maybe because it is POWERful? All joking aside, it has either 4 way or 8 way SMT for a ridiculous number of threads.

[NeoMorpheus]

I really want them to try to compete in the desktop market. As much as I love AMD, we need alternatives.

Be ARM, RISC-V or POWER.

[Estranged1906]

I really want them to try to compete in the desktop market. As much as I love AMD, we need alternatives.

Be ARM, RISC-V or POWER.

Would be funny if they succeeded and gave a second life to MorphOS and AmigaOS which cling on to ancient PowerPC hardware.