While POWER9 was big for open-source fans with the formation of the OpenPOWER Foundation and Raptor Computing Systems designing POWER9-based systems that are fully open-source down to schematics and the motherboard firmware, the same can’t be currently said about POWER10.
[…]While IBM has published a lot of the POWER10 firmware as open-source, remaining closed for at least the time being is their off-chip OMI DRAM bridge and their on-chip PPE I/O processor.
This sucks. I am a huge fan of Raptor’s fully open POWER9 workstation and boards, and despite Raptor hinting for months now there were issues with POWER10’s openness, I was hoping things would be figured out before the release of IBM’s new POWER10 processors this month. Sadly, this seems to have been wishful thinking. Raptor’s POWER9 workstations are the only fully open performance-oriented computers you can get, and until IBM decides otherwise, it’s going to stay that way.
That just sucks.
This is about the firmware and not the processor. The headline even says:
Of course. The POWER9 and POWER10 are just as proprietary as x86 is. Any Tom, Dick or Harry can’t just download the schematics and fab their own POWER processors
Well IBM has released open implementations of POWER: https://openpowerfoundation.org/openpower-foundation-introduces-ibm-hardware-and-software-contributions-at-openpower-summit-2020/
But i was pointing out that Thom left out an important word from the story, and that we are talking about firmware and not processors.
Could something besides “suck” be used to describe things?
The Power10 procs do not engage in sexual acts, which would be weird if the did, and there is nothing wrong with liking to suck c*ck. They can certainly by considered hobbled for FOSS enthusiasts due to the need for proprietary firmware blobs.
Is this turning into the commenting section on Ars(e) Technica? That would really suck.
…no. Just, no.
When used as a swear, there is no intrinsic sexual connotation. “Your team sucks” does not have any sexual implications, and people who believe it does, have a deep misunderstanding of the use of the word in that context.
It’s like the work “fuck”. Sure it has sexual connotations in some senses, but the sentence “Fucking fuckers fucking with our fucking language” doesn’t have any sexual connotations at all. It depends on context.
Unless, you know, those fuckers are currently fucking.