as i’ve understood is completly open, why do not use powerpc instead x86?
It’s not entirely off the table (risc-v as I understand it is more likely to be a good candidate soon), but I think the issue with powerpc is that it’s not going to be a recent/powerful computer with all the latest bells and whistles (virtual machine extensions for qubes for example, optimized vector arithmetic instructions, etc… ) and there might be some software incompatibilities as well.
That’s just my opinion and I never researched it personally, so I might be wrong.
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I believe eagle is referring to OpenPower (the spirtual successor to PowerPC chips).
The design is open and is IMHO a better choice than risc-v. This was to be the architecture for the failed crowdfunded Talos workstation by Raptor Engineering. They still claim on their site to sell blob free workstations and servers:
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The software incompatibility issue will be there regardless of OpenPower or not (and for risc-v as well of course), and like I said, I don’t know much about hardware, so you may be right, but all I know is that risc-v is all the buzz right now and there is a lot of work on that front
I doubt I’m adding much substance to this thread, but I will say that, with respect to capability, the POWER processors are plenty powerful - no pun intended. I work professionally with a lot of IBM i users (POWER-based machines, proprietary OS, though IBM are getting past the dark days of the SCO legal battles, and increasingly getting behind open source), and they really are the backbone of much of the world’s economy. They are transaction processing beasts the majority of people are unfamiliar with.
It’s kind of a shame the PowerPC chips ran too hot for laptops, and it’s a shame IBM was slow to deliver; otherwise, Apple would not have felt the need to switch to Intel. Would possibly have been that much more competition today.
SUSE has been running on POWER for many years, and Linux on POWER is a big initiative of IBM’s. I have a few customers running Ubuntu on POWER systems.
Anyway, that’s all.
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The super computers number 1 and number 2 of the current top 500 are both OpenPOWER systems. So I guess you are wrong.