• Yokemate of Keyboards
    Yokemate of Keyboards
    Andreas_Wolf
    Posts: 12182 from 2003/5/22
    From: Germany
    > Well someone else obviously thinks PowerPC is still useful:
    > http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4399118/Startup-plugs-Power-chips-into-energy-efficient-servers

    From that article:

    "Along with IBM, Servergy is the only company currently making Power-based servers."

    There has always been Hitachi's SR series using IBM POWER chips:

    - SR16000 with POWER6 and POWER7
    - SR11000 with POWER4 and POWER5

    I've been under the impression that these machines are built by Hitachi around the POWER chips they obtain from IBM. Or maybe these are just relabelled IBM machines?

    "ItÂ’s not clear whether Servergy designed its own Power processor or is using an off-the-shelf chip. [...] analysts said they are unaware of any company making merchant Power chips for servers. One possibility is the company could be using a chip derived from an existing IBM chip design."

    This is interesting. I found an Oracle blog article from a month ago stating:

    "The first system I'd like to tell you about is a really cool 8 core Power Architecture Hyper-Efficient Enterprise Server from a company in Dallas called Servergy."

    And from Servergy's Principal Software Engineer Ben Collins' blog, also one month ago:

    "The company I've been gainfully employed with for the past 1.5 years seems to be using something quite different than your grandmother's Power chip. Not quite the behemoth of the IBM Power7 iron (in size nor noise), but not the wussy of your old PowerMac neither. We're talking multiway SoCs with full floating-point running at a fraction of the wattage of just about anything else on the market. Add with it full hardware virtualization (via KVM), and you begin to see where in the market this is headed."

    No more specific details than "8 core" and that it's not IBM POWER given unfortunately. I have a feeling that it could be a QorIQ chip, judging from Ben Collins' Freescale-focused comments here and there, as well as from his personal development repository.
    Digging somewhat deeper and searching for his development mailing list postings from the last few months answers the question I think:

    https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/2/27/237
    http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-ppc/2012-05/msg00243.html
    https://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/linuxppc-dev/2012-June/098255.html
    https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kernel-team/2012-June/020738.html
    https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kernel-team/2012-June/020741.html
    https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kernel-team/2012-June/020655.html
    https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kernel-team/2012-June/020693.html
    https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kernel-team/2012-June/020735.html
    https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kernel-team/2012-November/022652.html
    https://lists.launchpad.net/ubuntu-powerpc/msg00066.html
    https://lists.launchpad.net/ubuntu-powerpc/msg00073.html

    And the most revealing one regarding adding e500mc support to Ubuntu's Linux kernel:

    "Our company is in talks to become a full partner with Canonical, so I suspect this makes it more of an official offering than anything else. Also, I am being paid to do community work on this kernel and maintain it fully. [...] Also, this line of processors has a large community base. Most PowerPC developers have similar machines (benh)."
    https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kernel-team/2012-June/020733.html

    In conclusion, my guess is: It's Freescale's 32-bit QorIQ P4080 chip (8 e500mc cores), so nothing to write home about and in my opinion a rather questionable choice for a server platform.

    [ Edited by Andreas_Wolf 24.12.2012 - 11:57 ]
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