[_chu1]

If a company is serious about making POWER based SBCs or motherboards that are affordable yet fast enough for enthusiasts (no ECC, commonly used components), there would be a lot more interest. The price is what would make me turn away from POWER, as much as I love it and the ability for it to be based on completely open hardware. Someone with a lot of new ideas and a lot of energy doing something crazy like x86 binary translation or a Cell-styled CPU would also bring more attention to the platform.

RISC-V built a lot of traction very fast and was affordable and is now starting to be competitive with ARM, so it has different circumstances around it.

There's a group developing a POWER based laptop with a quad-core NXP processor, I've been watching them since 2020 and they've made some pretty good progress. It even has an MXM3 slot for adding a dedicated video card.

https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/

[snvzz]

>no ECC

Please no. ECC is a must.

Not having ECC being common is an abnormal, bad situation to fix, rather than preferred.

[duskwuff]

> There's a group developing a POWER based laptop with a quad-core NXP processor

What I've seen from that project in the past does not fill me with confidence, and nothing I've seen since has changed that impression. Even if the project results in working hardware (which is uncertain), its performance is unlikely to be on par with expectations.

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23988511

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28578021

[_chu1]

I have felt the same way about it a bit, and I do think they need to change a few things if they plan to get anywhere with it. I do hope though that they're able to succeed, they aren't stuck with that design forever and what they learned could be applied to a successor model. They should really consider partnering or merging with Raptor Computing, the last thing the scarce POWER market needs is more fragmentation.

[duskwuff]

I don't think they have anything useful to contribute. The PowerPC Notebook project has had prototypes in hand since Dec 2022, and bringup progress is essentially zero. It took them until July 2023 to realize they needed a JTAG debugger, and as of their last update in December, they still didn't have U-Boot working. At the rate they're going, a lot of the parts they used are likely to be discontinued before the computer is usable.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> RISC-V built a lot of traction very fast and was affordable and is now starting to be competitive with ARM, so it has different circumstances around it.

And, N=1, for all that I'm default-interested in new / less common CPU options, RISC-V only recently became really interesting with the availability decent-enough Linux-capable hardware <$100. This especially matters when it's competing against a plethora of sub-$100 ARM SBCs.

[weare138]

This was definitely the problem. I was interested in OpenPOWER when it came out but there were almost no vendors in the space. Expensive Talos and IBM workstations and a handful of dev boards were pretty much it.