Raptor's Blackbird Arrives As The Most Open-Source Yet Fast Desktop System

[andyprough]

For those asking about browsers, they exist but will not play certain media types due to lack of PPC support for certain codecs.

Talos has been working with IBM on getting Chromium ported with codec support. See the Talos website for details.

Raptor provides a PPA with Chromium binaries for Debian and Ubuntu here: https://quickbuild.io/~raptor-engine...untu/chromium/

[wizard69]

This is a very interesting product and I’d be tempted if it wasn’t for a focus on low energy usage hardware at the moment. To that end Micheal I hope you can post energy usage numbers soon. Especially interested in standby, and light usage numbers. Total system power usage when being driven to max performance is also important but I’d you have always on usage in mind idle power is a factor in chip selection.

This highlights a big big problem with Power, there is nothing on the market that I know of that competes with sub 10 to 15 watt processors. For that matter there isn’t a good laptop chip that I know of. Being open doesn’t really make up for the lack of hardware where it would be most interesting (to me anyways).

[stan]

Raptor provides a PPA with Chromium binaries for Debian and Ubuntu here: https://quickbuild.io/~raptor-engine...untu/chromium/

I hope the patches get merged upstream soon so that Chromium and hopefully Firefox "just work" out of the box on multiple Linux distributions. That will surely increase market acceptance of PPC hardware.

[dsmithhfx]

Nice specs, but this is a curio for a well-heeled, niche market at best. For the same money, one could build several mid-range x86 pc's with similar combined TDP -- arguably a more useful (though bulkier) kit, apart from a very few conceivable use cases.

[torsionbar28]

Nice specs, but this is a curio for a well-heeled, niche market at best. For the same money, one could build several mid-range x86 pc's with similar combined TDP -- arguably a more useful (though bulkier) kit, apart from a very few conceivable use cases.

Yikes, sounds like you've missed the point entirely.

[beep]

I would like to see some information about thermal levels and how well the stock cooler performs.
How much cooling is needed on average load, how noisy does it get?
I know this is not related to the board itself but when you have the stock cooler anyway I would love to hear your thoughts about it.

[stan]

stan Firefox works on powerpc it just has no JIT but with the beast that the machine is, it does not bother browsing that much if you have NoScript installed. On the other hand, Chromium just works and has JIT, it just is not upstreamed yet because Google wont accept/review the patches for what it appears to be a political de-prioritization. Someone maintains an ungoogled-chromium ppc fork at https://gitlab.com/lle-bout/ungoogled-chromium

Thanks, I'm glad that there is an ungoogled-chromium ppc fork. I wonder if how difficult it is to re-base whenever a new chromium release comes out. That way, the security fixes etc can be incorporated into the fork.

[elatllat]

Can it be passively cooled and what is the idle power consumption.

[curaga]

Comparing the quick Blackbird results to my older power8 makes it seem not so good: https://openbenchmarking.org/result/...SP-1811068SK37 - the Blackbird 4c is almost exactly half my power8 8c. This is worse than expected, as my cooling is not the best, and there's supposed to be IPC improvements from POWER8 to POWER9.

[curaga]

The frequencies are almost the same: mine is 3.3/3.8, the power9 is 3.2/3.8.