Raptor Computing Reveals More Details About Their Blackbird Low-Cost POWER9 Board

[Dawn]

Have they moved ARM64 out of beta? I did not think this was the case. Web site still shows it as beta:

https://access.redhat.com/products/red-hat-enterprise-linux/

It seems I was mistaken about RHEL for ARM. Nonetheless, z support has been in RHEL for many years, so it's not just x86 and Power.

[starshipeleven]

I wonder how that Marvell-Controller goes along with being blob free, let alone even working in Linux (or BSD) at all. Marvell sold a lot of chips with bad support in the past.

I really doubt it is blob-free, but it is probably cheaper and simpler than the Microsemi SAS controller.

[starshipeleven]

Is this Red Hat support of POWER hardware part of a long term strategy or do they actually have important customers using POWER hardware? Do you know?

Also SUSE supports (and has supported) POWER https://www.suse.com/products/power/

Afaik there are only "unofficial" Tumbleweed ports for Power arch, no Leap. https://software.opensuse.org/distributions/tumbleweed (the ppc64 and ppc64le )

[coder]

... IBM's z mainframes - which are not Power - and, since last November, ARM64.

Wow. Whose CPUs are they using? Qualcomm? Cavium?

[coder]

So you think motherboard manufacturers are able to implement USB ports at 5 Gbps or more, but a stereo out is too hard?
Most times it's enough, but sometimes there's "computer noises" if you aren't lucky. Usually on decade old low end hardware or older.

It's about priorities and expertise. USB either works or it doesn't, but sound requires good analog design to be noise-free. It also cost a bit of money to implement sound well.

I have a Supermicro workstation board from about 6-7 years ago with noisy sound. It's definitely not low-end, nor old enough for that to be an excuse. I think sound quality just wasn't a priority for them. I imagine one would have better luck with gaming-oriented boards.

[freespirit]

I really doubt it is blob-free, but it is probably cheaper and simpler than the Microsemi SAS controller.

their statment is that board as the talos is completly blob free, the only exception is the NIC and they are working to freeing it

[rene]

How practical would a Power 9 based PC be as your regular desktop? Is there full Linux OS support with Ubuntu, Fedora or something else? Is there a GNU compiler port and any X86 binary compatibility tools at all? Will I be able to do the basics of emails, write documents and surf the web. I remember the problems that game developers apparently had with Playstation 3 game development, but that may have been with the other parts of the system than the Power PC CPUs. I would very much like a non-X86 desktop again (had SUN workstations in the past).

an PowerPC iBook and such were my main Linux development machines around 2002-2005 or so, still use my #t2sde on a G4 Cube, and G5 tower on a bi-weekly basis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU1RK4TR-GA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxaR2dkUpLI

[starshipeleven]

Wow. Whose CPUs are they using? Qualcomm? Cavium?

None of that crap, it's still an IBM thing, but not a Power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/Architecture

RHEL, SUSE and Ubuntu are certified to work on it (Ubuntu was a late addition, a few years ago https://www.zdnet.com/article/ubuntu...the-mainframe/ )

[starshipeleven]

their statment is that board as the talos is completly blob free, the only exception is the NIC and they are working to freeing it

I have never seen a PCIe Marvell controller that does not have its own firmware in a flash chip.

The only ones that don't have it are the controllers embedded in their ARM SoCs.

[starshipeleven]

So you think motherboard manufacturers are able to implement USB ports at 5 Gbps or more, but a stereo out is too hard?
Most times it's enough, but sometimes there's "computer noises" if you aren't lucky. Usually on decade old low end hardware or older. It's also possible to get a USB sound card or PCI sound card that's bad enough to be worse than integrated motherboard sound.

Sound is analog, USB is digital. "computer noises" are interference, which is an issue for analog, but not so much for digital.

If you see the newer gaming boards, you see that they have isolation and some shielding around the audio part of the board, it's not just marketing.

Leaving this here: ASUS USB soundcards work very well also on Linux and you can get high-end ones with 7.1.