BracketMaster

IBM also cells POWER9 workstations: https://www.ibm.com/products/power-system-s914/pricing

IBM charges 11k for their 8 core POWER9 CPU alone...

I have a POWER9 system actually - it has a number of shortcomings that make it not so practical as a daily driver. For one, it doesn't go to sleep and draws 27Watt at a minimum. It also has no integrated graphics which means I need an AMD or NVIDIA graphics card which have spotty support at best on POWER...

Not to mentioned it takes anywhere between 90s and 5 minutes to boot. It spends over one minute doing init including things like training DDR4 and PCI-e serdes links.

A repost of a question I posted a little over two years ago. I'm wondering who actually buys IBM POWER9 systems - and does IBM actually net money off POWER9?

My other concern is that their tooling works in the browser which probably means either typescript or js. If they have simulation support, I hope it's not implemented in ts or js...

I know wasm is also a thing now - so maybe they compiled C or Rust to Wasm or something.

Has anybody used FluxAi? Most PCB designs strike me as not so difficult. IMO PCBs get hard when you introduce RF or high speed signaling. I wonder how flux deals with this and if they have support for simulating RF or design rules for laying down SERDES links such as PCI-e for example...

Thanks - there are a number of these actually. I guess my title of "no electron alternatives" should have been "no native alternative to popular electron apps such as slack or discord"

There is jitsi - but it doesn't have a native client.

There's also iced.rs

Basically - I have a full time job, so I need to be convinced that spending another 5 - 8 hours a day on a zoom replacement over the next few months is worth the trouble - or find a way to fund myself to do this.

I'm kind of hoping some people might have some comments or answers or two cents.

While I love the trailblazing Tesla has done for EVs and smart cars, it's moments like these that make me cringe.

Obviously, we don't know right now if the driver was at fault or not - but I'm a capable coder and have some exposure to control theory as well as microcontrollers - and would be more than happy to audit Tesla's firmware.

Even more, I think there's a case to be made here for formal verification and high assurance languages such as SPARK.

It would be nice if you could pass the Tesla codebase to a formal solver and ask the solver "prove that pressing the brake never accelerates", and then have the resulting code and proof be made public.

so this guy was a software engineer and then he became a dentist, and he decided to do everything stallman style, designing all the dental software and hardware himself on Linux from scratch.

He wrote drivers for the xray machines??!!

I say laser because its kinda hard to make narrow beams with traditional waveguides.

Simulator is written internally in Nim. There isn't really a good FOSS IR for RTL sims on the market currently. I absolutely refuse to use MLIR or anything based on LLVM for that matter. LLVM takes up to 40 minutes to rebuild on my Apple silicon. This is completely unacceptable in terms of rapid iteration.

Yosys is a very capable FOSS synthesizer and Verilator is a FOSS simulator actually used in production at ARM.

Not yet - but keep an eye out here: https://github.com/chipeleven

Happy to have a chat. How may I reach you?

One thing people don't often bring up is how great nim is for writing DSLs.

DSLs really matter in the hardware and digital design space - a space that seems to be completely devoid of innovation when it comes to tooling.

A couple languages that try to bring RTL into the 21st century are nMigen-Python and Chisel-Scala.

I'm currently writing an RTL in Nim.

Nim's macro system allows you to do really cool things like instantiate named RTL wires and create custom operators like `:=` for Signal assignment. Really excited about tier 1 BigNum support coming soon - which will make it easier to simulate arbitrary width integer signal arithmetic.

Again - we're not going for 3070GTX performance levels here. We plan to disrupt industry by being the first production grade open source GPU implementation ever.

So the initial corporate customers we talked to just want something that plays 1080p videos and is passable at 3D graphics. Currently, the GPGPU hits at around 25GFLOPS peak performance on an ARIA FPGA. We're targeting GF12nm - some back of the envelope calculation put us at 125GFLOPS for actual silicon implementations.

We need somebody with GPU driver expertise as well as GPU architecture expertise. The guy we were considering going with for this summer wants to just wrap up his dissertation instead and graduate - which is totally understandable.

The GPU was largely a one man effort by him. He is very talented.

Here's our website if it helps: https://chipeleven.com

Feel free to ask me any questions about what on earth we're actually doing.

Its definitely not investor driven at all. We had a long long internal hashing out of RISC-V vs. POWER internally - and POWER won by a long shot when it came to sheer demand from potential customers interested in something other than embedded hard drive controller CPUs.

For example, POWER right now support off the shelf AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. POWER also has full JSv8 web browser and JDK engine support.

And I also don't build companies for investors. EVER.

I've chosen investors that believe in the vision and I am not afraid to be vocal.