For $3100 USD You Can Have A Fast, Fully-Free-Software Workstation

First up is C-Ray, one of our favorite multi-threaded ray-tracers. With this test, the Talos Workstation was running just behind the Core i7 5960X and Xeon E5-1680 v3. The i7-5960X is still Intel's $999 USD CPU while the Xeon E5-1680 v3 is no longer available for purchase retail but commanded about a $1,700 price tag. Also keep in mind for the $3,100 USD system it comes with the motherboard, CPU, heatsink/fan, and I/O plate. Selling the full system is being looked at for a later run.

The Parallel BZIP2 compression benchmark put the Talos Workstation in line with the Core i7 Extreme Edition processors, but it was only a few seconds ahead of an AMD FX-8370. The current I/O bottleneck of the Talos Workstation prototype is likely to blame for not having an even more stellar showing.

OpenSSL currently appears completely unoptimized for POWER8 or there are other issues with this test on POWER, so for now that result is basically useless.