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by badgersnake 82 days ago
Power is open. But nobody wants to build power devices for some reason.
3 comments
UltraSane 82 days ago
They are very expensive. Cheapest Power9 system Raptor Systems has is $6,794.99 and it has only 4 cores and 8GB DDR4 RAM and 128GB SSD. Reminds me of Sun Sparc pricing.

https://www.raptorcs.com/content/BK1SD1/intro.html

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badgersnake 82 days ago
Yeah, that’s because nobody is building them so they have to use IBM server chips.
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UltraSane 82 days ago
Why is the motherboard so expensive?
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badgersnake 82 days ago
Same problem, low volume
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ricardobeat 82 days ago
Power?
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supermatt 82 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_ISA
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ricardobeat 82 days ago
RISC-V is also open. That “some reason” is likely to be power/performance levels being quite far from ARM & Intel for consumer devices.
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vrganj 82 days ago
China is building out RISC-V, just like they are leading actually-open AI.

https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3347684/alibaba-d...

Weirdly, the authoritarian state is the one saving us from our own digital authoritarians.

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NitpickLawyer 82 days ago
> they are leading actually-open AI.

How are they leading? If I parse this correctly, "actually" open would mean fully open data training and weights? Then, by this definition, I'm only aware of Olmo (AllenAI - Seattle), Apertus (Swiss) and to some degree (unclear what data was actually published) Nemotron (Nvda, US). What are some examples of chinese similar models? (I'm not aware of any).

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badgersnake 82 days ago
RISC-V is slow though
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snvzz 82 days ago
RISC-V is an ISA.

There's nothing inherently slow about it, anymore than there is anything inherently slow about x86 or ARM.

High performance microarchitecture implementations are definitely possible. Some of them are available for licensing.

At least one of them (Tenstorrent Ascalon) has been tapped out into a chip and will show up in development boards later this year.

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badgersnake 81 days ago
If you can’t buy a fast one, then it’s slow.

It might not be slow forever, but it’s slow now. I’d love to see an open ISA that is fast. But I don’t understand why the industry decided to start over with RISC-V when the compilers and toolchains and chips already existed in power land.

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jagged-chisel 82 days ago
That’s no guarantee that a Power implementation isn’t compromised.
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