TalosSpace has more details on the upcoming, recently announced OpenPOWER machines from Raptor.
I asked Timothy Pearson at Raptor about the S1’s specs, and he said it’s a PCIe 5.0 DDR5 part running from the high 3GHz to low 4GHz clock range, with the exact frequency range to be determined. (OMI-based RAM not required!) The S1 is bi-endian, SMT-4 and will support at least two sockets with an 18-core option confirmed for certain and others to be evaluated. This compares very well with the Power10, which is also PCIe 5.0, also available as SMT-4 (though it has an SMT-8 option), and also clocks somewhere between 3.5GHz and 4GHz.
S1 embeds its own BMC, the X1 (or variant), which is (like Arctic Tern) a Microwatt-based ISA 3.1 core in Lattice ECP5 and iCE40 FPGAs with 512MB of DDR3 RAM, similar to the existing ASpeed BMC on current systems. X1 will in turn replace the existing Lattice-based FPGA in Arctic Tern as “Antarctic Tern,” being a functional descendant of the same hardware, and should fill the same roles as a BMC upgrade for existing Raptor systems as well as the future BMC for the next generation systems and a platform in its own right. The X1 has “integrated 100% open root of trust” as you would expect for such a system-critical part.
This all sounds like exactly the kind of things I wanted to hear, and these details make me sufficiently excited about the near future of Raptor’s OpenPOWER workstations. The only little bit of less pleasant news is that the machines won’t be available until late 2024, so we’ve got a little wait ahead of us.
This is very curious, and is going to be very interesting. A no-name company coming out with a new PowerPC chip in a couple years time that is meant to compete with Power10?
Is it Power10 cores with part of the so-called Uncore (to use Intel’s terminology) designed by Solid Silicon? It might seem unlikely that IBM would want to share something so important, but if they’re confident that there won’t be any market overlap, it does help them grow PowerPC, which was one of their goals with OpenPOWER Foundation
I’m pretty convinced this will effectively be an IBM chip, made by IBM, with some small modifications to address the proprietary firmware blobs. No way this is an entirely new chip.
Which is okay! In fact, it’s incredibly smart.
This could be a very interesting machine for running Haiku-OS. If only the ppc-support was better, but a lot can happen in a year.