Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Little Endian

Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by rwmj on Friday July 22, 2016 @04:13AM (#12142336)

Somewhere in the $500-1000 range would be cheap enough that I could buy one and expense it.

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Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by robin_reala on Friday July 22, 2016 @05:12AM (#12142508)

Their estimated price for the board without the CPU is $2700, indicating that they’re expecting a minimum price for $1000 for the CPU alone.

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Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by rwmj on Friday July 22, 2016 @06:20AM (#12142707)

IBM POWER CPUs are really expensive because their yields must be very small. However there are other sources of POWER CPUs. POWER CPUs aren't intrinsically expensive.

Freescale are one (eg. the e5500 - I can't keep up with whether that exact model was POWER7, but last I checked Freescale did a POWER7 CPU). These are much cheaper. But the problem with them is they are embedded CPUs (book E?), so they omit some instructions required to run server versions of Linux. Also IIRC they are all big endian, or at least had some problem running in LE mode.

Anyway to get to my point: unless there are affordable development boards for POWER, no one is going to spend much time porting software and fixing bugs for POWER.

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