 Hello, everyone, so I'm Georg and I'm a free software guy And in my journey in the professional world off free software because that's all we do I have come across a story That I found rather intriguing and when I tried to discuss it with my colleagues and friends in the free software community They all went. What is that? I've never heard of this like, huh? And since that's consistently the reaction I've been getting for the past half year or so I figured it's perhaps worth to actually give a talk about it and Give you an idea of why I think the power story is actually one that should interest us very much So first briefly what do we do? So collab systems Headquartered in Switzerland, although we have an office here in Berlin as well Um, we are a color collaboration software provider We an ISV and we provide the software. It's a hundred percent free software. It's a hundred percent open standards So we do like email, you know tasks note calendar contacts Files everything shared of course in installations up to hundreds of thousands of users And one of the largest clients of ours is this year's holding corporation the guys with the big sears tower Previously, although they had to sell it because it got too small for them So we do collaboration software As a group we are strongly free software minded in fact All of us if you ask us will typically consider things such as open core or you know With that shared source or whatever abominations We're all from the free software community long-term free software community members our CTO should be rather well known to a lot of people here Given that it's Aaron Seigo who's been president of KDE for a couple of years as well, right? So we are from the free software community all of us So we're a software company right software is what we do Why would we care about hardware because open power is actually hardware It's like why do we get involved in that? Why would we even bother to get involved in this? Well, it's really well readable anyway So why do we care? One reason is call up now call up now is a software as a service you can call it a cloud platform It's a run on it's obviously running Cola, right? It's a hundred percent free software like the entire stack everything we run in our own data centers is always free software We never use a proprietary offering for anything really It's a hundred percent free software is developed by the provider us, right? And it's our own operation So no one outside the company has hands on anything and it's our own hardware We own the hardware actually We've bought it and it's expensive. Let me tell you but we've bought it The reason we did that is very simple. We figured Anyone with access to the hardware obviously is in a unique position to compromise whatever comes on top, right? If you have access to the hypervisor, of course, you can get access to anything that is running on the hypervisor So the only way that we can actually say This is best practice secure to the best level we can make it is By doing it from the bottom up, which is why we say we need to have the hardware the operations need to be ours Hosted in a data center that is, you know Nicely caged and secure in a cage that only we have access to and so on and so forth We're actually the only one that I know in this space that fulfill all these requirements Most others fulfill one or maximum two of these now Running our own hardware buying our own hardware is of course Something where we start to think about what hardware do we run, right? That's one of the ways in which we got involved in the question So what are we running like, you know the hardware level is compromised as a problem because it compromises everything above So how can we assure that it's actually trustworthy that what we run is secure for us? That's a problem and it's one that's been discussed for like laptops and other Devices a lot in the community server side. We generally tend to say there is no alternative So What should I do anyway and buy Intel, right? The other thing is of course we also provide collab to customers, right? Clients who run this on-premise like the city of Munich for instance Anyone who wants can run collab in their own installations very often These are also application service providers or companies that feel that they want some level of control over the data Again, they will ask us How to run this best, right? For them security integrity and control are important matters. So the question is how do we do that and well? Yes, I mean then we say yeah, I mean we can give you this part of the stack, right? But I mean we cannot guarantee anything underneath Because well, you know the hardware part we don't have no control over Because I mean obviously with Intel there's always the big fat elephant in the room Intel processors are remarkably complex. They're remarkably closed We know they have upcodes in there that are specifically put in there for Google for Facebook, right? No one else knows them. No one else has access to them. We don't really know what's happening in them We know they have a management engine in there that can do all sorts of things Including talk over the network, you know bypassing your operating system bypassing your firewall So you do you don't see this anywhere, right? There's no chance of controlling this on the machine You need to have other machines that then control whatever comes from that machine trying to mitigate this But your problem is even while you can do everything to try to mitigate that You don't want your own hardware to work against you, right? I mean you don't want to go to that trouble You would ideally have hardware that actually does what you wanted to do where you can ensure it's actually secure and figure out what it is doing and make it part of your Defense not something as a threat vector to defend against So that's where we've been coming from right like we have a problem here I mean we don't like this We've not seen anyone with a really good answer most people tend to just ignore the problem Which you know if you don't know any solutions is perhaps a rational choice It is however Not a good one for us Oh great. So why is there no alternative? I'll have to read this off for you because there's no way you can read these Cost is one of them, right? If you wanted to build something That would be competitive to a modern architecture Intel Server, right? I mean you should build something that's data-centered level hardware The investment that you would have for that is enormous. You would need gigantic amounts of competency You need the means of production, right? The question is How good is it? What's the efficiency the energy efficiency is really important? I mean it's been going up and up and up for every new generation of hardware I mean in Switzerland the energy is so expensive that very often people swap out the hardware every four to five years Because the purchase of the new hardware is financed by the electricity saving alone. I mean, it's really expensive So I'm getting it. You know, yes, you know, we can build hardware. Yes, but can we get that level of efficiency? That's really hard to do. I mean there is decades literally decades of innovation in this Where quite a few very smart people have been working on that problem? So in other words, it's a long way to the top If you want to rock and roll, right? It's you have a very very very long way to go Going from zero to where they are now Even as amazing as this community is, I think would be a real problem for us You know, I don't think any of us has the level of resource competency and dedication to make that happen It would probably take nation states competently by bonding together to do this however nation states and competent in it and together Isn't the most common thing to happen, right? so Hardware has history. I mean we have the Intel history, right long long history I mean I myself started also as an assembler developer actually on the Amstrad CPC 464 Yes, exactly. He had it too. It was actually a wonderful machine at the time. That's really great And then I switched to the Atari ST with a 68k processor, right? and this was like a huge leap I mean ridiculous difference and Imagine my disappointment when I switched to the PC later because that was obviously the coming platform and I looked at the Assembler codes and they looked oddly familiar From back in the Z80 days. I mean it's the same principle same registers same instructions, right? You got like wait a minute. That's just a Z80 on steroids and Effectively, that's what Intel is until today because they cannot get out of that legacy. They cannot change the way they work Of course, that's also your arm, you know You're generally your risk area of of computing That has developed to it has also had evolution in multiple ways and forms and shapes, right? the power PC I mean this is the 92 I mean IBM's been at that for a long long time, right? IBM's been developing the power PC for a very long time. It's been continuing to evolve it and actually Technically the power PCs have always been very good. However, of course IBM especially the 90s has also not really been the greatest company to work with, right? so the power PC had its shortcomings in the sense of who to work with Intel just beat them on on on market penetration hands-down and Still these other platforms continue to evolve and In fact, I mean today we have power eight power nine is now in the making When you look technically at what these processors do, right? They are Incredibly Forgive me the pun powerful Power is really good at heavy IO Heavy compute heavy parallel It is much better than Intel on those I mean the bang for buck you get on those is much much better actually and all of these are fantastic for like Data centers cloud, right? I mean that's exactly the kind of properties you would want to run many things in parallel efficiently on little hardware So it's actually really good for that Arm on the other hand. I mean it's obviously everywhere, right? I mean we all carry arm devices with us all the time I mean the arm generation is amazingly good at the You know low power get the most efficiency out of this because my battery is running out scenario There's very little, you know that does that better Intel technically maybe at this slide to be swapped is in the middle between them It tries to do everything right the entire spectrum, but it's actually not as good as good as either of the other two at Either the the data center thing or the low power thing So actually if we lived in a world where we only had power and arm That we were completely fine. We'd be missing nothing So Intel would not be missed. That's the bad news for Intel but Intel's of course still everywhere now IBM has done a move that I found very interesting and when I realized what they had done because I hadn't heard about this until about a year later About two three years ago now They actually said we're gonna put our entire knowledge all the patents all the specs Everything about the power architecture and the power chips Into the open power foundation And it's gonna be a member open Association anyone can join in fact I mean you could sign up today right membership is free for individuals and for academia So you don't even pay anything and you get access to everything. I Mean you can build your own chips in Fact Intel In fact China Well, there's a certain similarity, but China has chosen to do that China will build its own power chips They will disable parts of the crypto on the power CPU Because they don't understand them well enough to trust them But they can do that and they can add their own hardware modules to the motherboard later Right, they can build their own boards and everything so they don't need it on the on the CPU They can add it in other places so they disable that part Because they have the specification they can do it. They build their own CPUs now Rec space and Google have announced the new data center node for them Right they've designed a data center node based on power nine Because they want to put that into their data centers. They are members of the open power foundation as well There's a lot of motion in this going on we have now more than like 250. I think are members in the open power foundation and People who are starting to look at building workstations on power for security purposes Very obviously saying I want an actual workstation where I control it right because I have the I know what the CPU does I Will even have a market for CPUs where I have more than one factory more than one provider Building them. I Have the firmware. I have the software on top suddenly I can actually control this thing from the bottom up and That For me was rather interesting. I Mean once I realized What was going on there? I figured this is interesting enough for us at least as co-op to get involved because Well for us that means finally we can actually offer a full stack That's much more trustworthy than anything based on Intel, right? So we did this call up taster event series in June together with Red Hat and IBM where we showed people look guys It's actually you can have a full stack open now everything and I know that everyone including our governments is completely welcome to engage With the open power foundation. So if say hypothetically Europe said We actually want control over our IT, right? We want to control the stuff that runs our data centers that runs our governments Well, they could There could be a European power chip bill to the same specifications to the same quality and at the same technical level of What is running Google tomorrow and direct space tomorrow and Facebook tomorrow? We'd be eye-to-eye technically, but under our control Which I think is why we as a community should be interested. There's a story in this That adds a layer below what we are already doing that is fascinating Now the open power foundation is of course me. There's many members, right? It's like any associations with many different interests IBM has of course, you know started this whole thing, but they're deliberately now on giving up control But still I mean, of course, you know, but but it's IBM, right? I mean So here's why I think they're genuine about this they have burnt the bridges when IBM sold the laptops to me Lenovo right people that were like, well, that's a weird move right people like a bold move interesting Not so long ago, they also sold their server generation to Lenovo I mean IBM had built a very very modern architecture for you know, your Big data center and solutions on the entire flex system series that they've built. It's fairly new hardware It's actually better Technically better than what Dell or HP have to offer. It's a really fascinating extremely performant You know modern hardware. It will make money for a long time to come They sold it to Lenovo They sold it to Lenovo To burn the bridge and to get rid of the dependency on Intel Intel has no way anymore to hurt IBM Because they're no longer business-wise dependent on them. They've sold their dependency off and That to me when a company like IBM does that Means that they're serious about moving in a certain direction and then the level of engagement They show with a power story in the power foundation the amount of activity They show toward that the way in which they genuinely are willing to give up control the Chinese fab for for the power chips IBM is supporting them. It's actually encouraging them to do that, but it's not controlling them IBM understands and I believe genuinely that they the world is changing and in fact to me They understood that a long time ago. I mean, I remember Long time ago 12 13 14 years when I was sitting with I think it was Bob Sutter at the time From IBM at a dinner table and he told me look, you know, we understand I mean openness will move up and down the stack. It'll be everywhere Proprietary will only exist in certain niches in the future at some point. I mean, there's a transition period Yes and everything but openness will win We understand that so we need to restructure ourselves to actually live with that To as a company add value to this and to me the open power foundation is simply their way of trying to move that Into the hardware world to adapting in a way that they say we have our competency. We add our competency to this and You know, yes, we have we create ships and we want to sell chips, of course But we want to provide an actual value here and we're willing to Actually commit to this which they did by a putting into the foundation. So they've given it up, right? They've given it to the foundation Which is now means we can control it if we go into the foundation and get active there We can shape this we can build the next generation with them And they've burnt the Intel bridge Those two to me are strong signs Why I believe they're genuine So what I think as a community as People from the free software community what we should do is we should grab this. I Mean we should engage right away with this. We should get involved We should, you know Go make sure we go into the open power foundation. In fact, I spoke with Daniel Pocock earlier said I think Debian should totally join the open power foundation as an academic member, you know Let's go in there sure Well, first of all You you get a seat at the table. Secondly, you are I mean canonical for instance in there already, right? So you you get access to the parties that are working on the hardware you get also Access to I mean they have access programs for better hardware for development purposes stuff like that, right? So you get cheap access to the hardware if you need it And you get to engage with the actual members at the table because there's going to be very soon the open power summit in Europe and You are then there to actually Start talking to them because frankly my experience working with IBM is they are willing But they don't understand us very well Their understanding of how free software works of how the all this open innovation thing works of the community The culture of that Getting that into their company is a struggle for them. It's a real uphill struggle for them I mean, it's to the point that I suggested to some of them actually we should do a like a mentoring program, right? Where where we from free from the free software community adopt somewhere from IBM and teach them how it's done essentially because Getting that culture transfer is something that we can help them with and then we can shape the way that they Think about certain problems and we can help them evolve Along the route that leads to the to where we want to get with this as well So yes, I think we should actually and some of us are interested in hardware, right? We should pay more attention to this We should get engaged. We should support it. I think we should actually get involved and that is Perfectly on time and pretty much what I wanted to say Thank you very much Thank you very much Georg now. We have a roughly five minutes. Yeah questions answers. Okay over there so what if So what about building these things? I mean Obviously building the full chips would require a complete foundry which none of us have and which I think so is there Any thing that you could for instance Used to burn those into FPGAs or any any alternative implementation over Going to a foundry and have these things turned into silicon Wow, that's a question that I cannot answer I'll have to come back to you on that one, but please be in touch with me because I want to get you that answer Yeah, hi Regarding the desktop Open powers thing. I just want to say that there is an US company Raptor engineering who is Going to have a crowdfunding for a workstation based on open power. Do you know when it's coming? in a month they announced that yesterday that they Get interest now for crowd supply. So it's a Taylor's platform workstation. So Yeah, so it would be really good if this succeeds because afterwards although the beginning is very expensive Afterwards, it looks like it will be more affordable. So if you can spread the word that would be awesome Thank you for my sure that so everyone please in a month from now. We're gonna put out word as well Spread the word and support that because that's exactly the one I was also thinking of it's Talos with a raptor Exactly so they are trying to build a power-based workstation Which I think would be an incredibly important project to succeed because I would like to see more of those to be honest So let's help them along if we can actually hope they're gonna be in Barcelona because I wanted to talk to them Three questions first. How do you verify that the hardware you have is exactly that what you wanted from your provider? Is there any way? Well, I mean, that's always the big problem, right? I mean, it's that that's always the the the the million dollar question at the end of the day Of course you can test the chips to some extent, right? But at the end of the day, I mean look look at I mean you can't even test fucking cars for you there for their emissions apparently So at the end of the day, I mean these things are much more complex, right? So you can hide a lot in there in theory in practice on the question is whether or not they would get away with that And how long if you don't trust that one party the idea is that you can then buy from another If we succeed in building up a network of actual, you know Places to buy CPUs from as in producers of CPUs to those specifications Right at that point in time because specifications we can check right? It's just about making sure that that's actually ending up in silicon But then if we have an actual market there Then not only will the fact that you can lose market share and make the vendors a little bit more honest You can you also get to choose where to buy it from with Intel that hope is not there, right? I mean no one will ever buy them will ever build them okay second question in Combination with FPJs are there already someone thought about so I had to have already someone thought about network devices pulling them like You have your level three switch and you want to trust it so because power is extremely good for IO and and The whole you know Communication side. I mean actually in the power CPU you can even assign like a core to the to the IO So if you have an IO heavy application actually makes a lot of sense Your your hardware even isolates failing of the hardware underneath from your hypervisor level So the virtual machine no longer sees this as it doesn't Intel right? It's a lot more robust in that sense And I'm pretty sure you can also look at this from a built your own switches and you know Your own data center equipment from this. I don't know who has done that so far and is there any comment or Sentence from Projects like core boot or risk V what is it? What do they say? That that's a very good question The what I find is that most people haven't even considered this or thought about this or looked at power in any way shape Of form in the past you seem to know more than you so Yeah, so regarding core boot as everyone knows since Intel and the management engine or with the Platform security processor of AMD. It's not possible anymore to build a system or to buy an x86 system Where all the firmware is free? so in this regard the core boot project is very Looks very forward to open power There although IBM has as far as I know a free implementation of a bootloader there's also interest to port coboot over onto the power devices and Yeah, then there's the next thing regarding free platforms the other alternatives is arm devices in a certain part There's some little blob, but Yeah, there's also a good Talk from Timothy Pearson on the tailors website where he Shows all the way where he talks about the things what is arm good for is great told us It's for low power and battery device, but it won't be a replacement for Current desktop boards anytime soon because it's not as powerful Yeah, so coboot is very Well aware of it and hopes that open power succeeds Won't change Yeah, so so I mean frankly speaking I think a world With power on the on the server side And you know the powerful desktops and arm for everything that needs to be energy efficient and lightweight and carried with us Wouldn't be such a bad place to be in I think it's the far preferable to one where Intel is everywhere to be honest you mentioned that you That open power is not only targeted at At server systems, but also desktops. How is the graphics stack there? Oh That's a good question. I don't know. I mean look look up the specifications perhaps of the of the workstation that Raptor engineering is trying to build Because that's the first and only from at least to my knowledge Maybe you know more but that's the only one right now There's really realistically looking at creating that kind of workstation And I saw on the website that they have some level of the of a preliminary stack how they think it's gonna look like I don't know whether it's gonna change, but that might answer your question Thank you very much also to the people asking questions. Thanks again York. Thank you