Comment by zie
7 years ago
To some degree they have opened the Power9, which is hardware. For hardware it's like leaps and bounds more open than anything else out there that can compete with it.
RISC-V is more open, but the hardware isn't necessarily open, and it's not yet really competing at the same scale as Power9 does... yet. There is hope :)
Their open power initiative is really no more "open source" than say Intel's processors, with the possible exception of Management Engine shenanigans from Intel.
https://github.com/OpenPOWERFoundation and https://github.com/open-power
It's a lot more open than Intel's. You can get the hardware chip blueprints if you join the foundation.
But the firmware is all Apache 2 licensed.
Where's the source to Power 9 then?
https://github.com/OpenPOWERFoundation and https://github.com/open-power
This is not the entire source, but if you join the foundation you get the chip blueprints, etc.
But the entire BIOS is open. that's huge.
I mean, following that logic x86 is open because Coreboot exists. Or all of ARM and MIPS is open because YABOOT and U-BOOT are opensource.
You can get the HDL for both those archs if you join the right orgs too. No, open source means more than having 'open' in your pproject name.
1 reply →