Re: Tyan introduces 1U POWER8-based OpenPOWER server for HPC

Justin, AFAIK from what i learned on the IBM STU last year POWER chips have
had the capability to run in either big or little endian mode for a few
generations (at least power7, since i remember a lab machine where they
were playing with OPAL and it was a modified 720), They even said that
there were plans to have both modes running at the same time so you could
have a few big endian partitions running and other little endians (in a
full PowerVM machine, of course, not on L or OpenPower) i don't know if
that announcement has been made yet.
I suppose you'll have to benchmark both modes to find out if there is any
difference but i think that the biggest difference today could be compiler
support since ppc has been out for a long time and ppc-el is relatively new
(but being worked A LOT by IBM since they want ppc-el Ubuntu to compete
with x86). And of course COST. P8 machines running ppc-el Ubuntu vs P8
machines running SUSE or Redhat...
As always, don't take my word its just what i've heard or read about it.

Best Regards,

Roberto

On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 3:07 PM, Justin Dearing <zippy1981@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

So these chips run little endian or big endian? Are there different
assembly langues/opcodes in each mode? Is one the native one and the other
one translated?

More importantly, is one mode faster than the other mode?

On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 9:04 PM Roberto José Etcheverry Romero <
yggdrasil.raiker@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Unfortunately, no. You can't run any big endian software on OpenPower
machines. They are limited to the Opal (IIRC) firmware which locks the

CPU

to the little endian mode. You can run Ubuntu and any other flavor of

Linux

compiled for ppc-el but no AIX and no IBM i. Also, no PowerVM, only
PowerKVM.
That doesnt mean that these machines aren't nice beasts that i'd like to
play with.
I'm waiting to see if the bosses will buy me a developer 2U server from
Tyan that has a power8, just to see if we can use it to tempt customers

to

migrate linux workloads to LoP.

Best Regards,

Roberto

On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 7:35 PM, Justin Dearing <zippy1981@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

So can I run IBM i OS on it or just AIX and Power Linux?

Secondly, would it even make sense. This machine screams for data
collection for quantative finance with C++ software.

On Sat, Apr 9, 2016, 18:06 Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nice to see movement in the OpenPower arena.
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