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Comment by jabl | Hacker News Reader

Most Linux work for modern POWER seems to be for the ppc64le target, which runs the CPU in little endian mode.

That being said, there's probably a lot of libraries with x86-64 ASM kernels in them which will run slower if they have to use the generic C/whatever version on power.

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In terms of network effects of ISA-specific optimizations, it's problematic that not only is the workstation so expensive but POWER8/9 cloud availability seems to be only for orgs that buy a lot of compute time.

If you are a dev who isn't being paid by e.g. IBM or Red Hat to work on ppc64le stuff, it seems hard to get access to running your code on real hardware and running on qemu doesn't really make sense for optimizations.

It seems to me that the ISA could benefit from scaling down so that more developers had access.

They're already scaling down … in the POWER8 Talos campaign, the cheapest CPU option was something like $1300, the CPU they're offering here is only $300. And the board, because you don't need expensive memory buffer chips anymore, is almost half the price as then.

Yeah previously it was over $4,000 for the board and CPU, this is nearly half the price.

If they can keep this up, I could actually fork over the money for the 3rd gen.

Talos Model 3.

Oh wait, wrong company.

Fedora and RHEL do seem to come in big endian versions as well as little endian. Have not seen any other distros that do though.

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