Talos take II

First, ob-TenFourFox stuff. As the wonderful Dutch progressive rock band Focus plays "Sylvia" in the CD player, I'm typing this in a partially patched up build of FPR2, which has a number of further optimizations including an AltiVec-accelerated memchr() implementation (this improves JavaScript regex matching by about 15 percent, but also beefs up some other parts of the browser which call the same library function) and some additional performance backports ripped off from Mozilla's Quantum project. This version also has a re-tuned G5 build with some tweaked compiler settings to better match the 970 cache line size, picking up some small but measurable improvements on Acid3 and other tests. Even the G3 gets some love: while it obviously can't use the AltiVec memchr(), it now uses a better unrolled character matcher instead and picks up a few percentage points that way. I hope to finish the security patch work by this weekend, though I am still annoyed to note I cannot figure out what's up with issue 72.

Many of you will remember the Raptor Talos, an attempt to bring a big beefy POWER8 to the desktop that sadly did not meet its crowdsource funding goal. Well, I'm gratified to note that Raptor is trying again with a smaller scale system but a bigger CPU: the POWER9-based Talos II. You want a Power-based, free and open non-x86 alternative that can kick Intel's @$$? Then you can get one of these and not have to give up performance or processing (eheheh) power. The systems will use the "scale-out" dual socket POWER9 with DDR4 RAM and while the number of maximum supported cores on Talos II has not yet been announced, I'll just say that POWER9 systems can go up to 24 cores and we'll leave it at that. With five PCIe slots, you can stick a couple cool video cards in there too and rock out. It runs ppc64le Linux, just like the original Talos.

I'm not (just) interested in a thoroughly modern RISC workstation, though: I said before I wanted Talos to be the best way to move forward from the Power Mac, and I mean it. I'm working on tuning up Firefox for POWER8 with optimizations that should carry to POWER9, and once that builds, beefing the browser up further with a new 64-bit Power ISA JavaScript JIT with what we've learned from TenFourFox's 32-bit implementation. I'd also like to optimize QEMU for the purpose of being able to still run instances of OS 9 and PowerPC OS X in emulation at as high performance on the Talos II as possible so you can bring along your legacy applications and software. When pre-orders open up in August -- yes, next month! -- I'm going to be there with my hard-earned pennies and you'll hear about my experiences with it here first.

But don't worry: the G5 is still going to be under my desk for awhile even after the Talos II arrives, and there's still going to be improvements to TenFourFox for the foreseeable future because I'll still be using it personally for the foreseeable future. PowerPC forever.