The question is whether that's a bad thing. And as it stands right now, maybe it's not. High I/O throughput has historically been the shiny... | Continue reading
This blog is unambiguously pro-Power ISA, not least because I'm a long-time PowerPC bigot to start with, but also I think OpenPOWER — POWER9... | Continue reading
Thanks, D, who's quicker on the draw than I am: this image popped up on the Raptor Wiki . Looks like Kestrel and Arctic Tern made it to fu... | Continue reading
Just in case we needed any more reassurance we made the right move with OpenPOWER: Phoronix is reporting that Intel is about to get even ... | Continue reading
I've always maintained (possibly by personal experience) that one of the natural future markets for OpenPOWER is one of the architecture's p... | Continue reading
With the recent announcement that Ubuntu's ppc64le (" ppc64el ") flavour is moving to require POWER9 , it's worth asking not only how much ... | Continue reading
It's heeeeeee-re. I've completed the pull-up of the POWER9 Firefox JavaScript JIT to the current ESR, Firefox 91. As a bonus I also complete... | Continue reading
Our alert readers yield the most interesting tips (thanks D!), including a video quietly uploaded to the Raptor wiki currently linked nowh... | Continue reading
Yes, build a better emulator and the world will beat a path to your door to run their old brown x86 binaries. Right now that emulator is QE... | Continue reading
In our previous analysis we suspected that Raptor's indigestion over POWER10 was IBM failing to release some component of the firmware, m... | Continue reading
AnandTech has a great analysis of IBM's new z/Architecture mainframe processor Telum , the successor to z15 (so you could consider it the ... | Continue reading
Users relying on the Western Digital My Book Live and My Book Duo NAS systems had an ugly surprise last week when they were abruptly and rem... | Continue reading
After our article earlier this week on LibreBMC and my concern as to what it meant for Raptor's own Kestrel "soft BMC" project, Raptor's ... | Continue reading
UPDATE: On current systems (as of April 2020), see these errata . Talospace is a spinoff from the TenFourFox Development blog, which for... | Continue reading
Lots of people were excited by the news over Hangover's port to ppc64le , and while there's a long way to go, the fact it exists is a defi... | Continue reading
IBM took the wraps off POWER10 officially today , a (Samsung-manufactured) 7nm monster in 18 layers with up to 15 SMT-8 cores (120 threads)... | Continue reading
Still can't bear the sticker shock of your very own Talos II, or even a itty bitty Blackbird? Why not do what we all do for the machines we ... | Continue reading
Just in case you were planning on that Blackbird : because of Illinois' "shelter-in-place" order due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Raptor is an... | Continue reading
The Amigaphile community is possibly more rabid about its ecosystem than even us OpenPOWER dweebs, so right off I present my Amiga bona fi... | Continue reading
Many improvements have occurred in Microwatt , the little VHDL Power ISA softcore, so far the easiest way — particularly for us hobbyists —... | Continue reading
Holy monkeys of Mars. What a morning at the OpenPOWER Summit Keynote ( Day 2 )! I swear I'm not paid to write this stuff except for the triv... | Continue reading
Oh, you kids. When I was a boy I had to write my TenFourFox's AltiVec VP9 decoder with compiler intrinsics by hand and do all the endian c... | Continue reading
Well, bitcoins, anyway. I'm of two minds on software bounties personally: there's nothing like money for bringing interest to a new platform... | Continue reading
(*A big thanks to Tim Pearson at Raptor for his help with some of the technical questions, though I jealously guard my editorial integrity: ... | Continue reading
The Blackbird is now loaded into my home theatre rack. Just a couple tastes before the "full mini-review" later this week once I've ironed o... | Continue reading
(Before we begin: this post was not sponsored, vetted or in any other way written in official collabouration with IBM; I'm writing this up ... | Continue reading
At least in terms of sheer numbers, Power Macintoshes are still the most common Power ISA-based computers, and those of us who still used ... | Continue reading
I'm not going to fault IBM taking a victory lap with the POWER9 in their one-year anniversary retrospective. It's a kick-ass processor; tha... | Continue reading
Today's news is that apparently EdgeHTML, the layout engine for the Edge browser, is being replaced not just on mobile, not just for ARM on ... | Continue reading
We've just bought one of the Basic Blackbird Bundles (BK1B01, 90W 4-core POWER9 CPU, mATX mainboard, I/O plate and recovery DVD). Yes, they... | Continue reading
Yes, it's gross, but sometimes it's necessary. There's a lot of software for Intel processors, and there's a lot of it that you can't recomp... | Continue reading