Raptor's Blackbird micro-ATX POWER9 System Is Ready To Take Flight This Week

[andyprough]

Michael - last time you benchmarked the Talos II, you were able to run Debian 9.7, Debian Buster, Ubuntu 18.10, and Ubuntu 19.04 on all the tests, and openSUSE Tumbleweed on some of the tests. I've read that Fedora may have dropped their work on Power9, but not sure. Other than Gentoo, are there any distros different from your past efforts that you think might run on the Blackbird?

Obviously, this is an extremely exciting step forward for Power9, especially with the built-in HDMI and the PCIe. I'm assuming you'll be trying out a variety of video cards at some point?

[cb88]

Super interesting. Any chance Raptor boards will expose the Power CPUs NvLink in the future?
I'd sell my kingdom and all my horses for playing with an exposed NvLink + an Open source FPGA NvLink at the other end.

NVlink is a proprietary protocol... you'd wan to run OpenCAPI instead over the Blue Links.

[MPC7500]

Don't forget to select a heatsink for the 4-core bundle

[milkylainen]

Super interesting. Any chance Raptor boards will expose the Power CPUs NvLink in the future?
I'd sell my kingdom and all my horses for playing with an exposed NvLink + an Open source FPGA NvLink at the other end.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raptor's Blackbird micro-ATX POWER9 System Is Ready To Take Flight This Week

The much anticipated Raptor Blackbird is set to begin shipping over the days ahead. Blackbird is the lower-cost (compared to the Talos II Secure Workstation) micro-ATX motherboard for IBM POWER9 systems and offers open-source firmware as currently one of the most open, high-performance systems available...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raptor-Blackbird-Shipping