The Most Affordable & Open-Source POWER9 System To Date Can Now Be Pre-Ordered

[blacknova]

I'm not sure if it is possible to fit power9 into raspberri pi form factor
I think CPU itself would cover entire raspberri pi MB. Of course there are smaller systems with powerpc processors, but that would not be Power9.

[schmidtbag]

That 22-core is only $2625. That may be expensive, but it's actually a pretty good price overall, for a professional-grade CPU. You'd pay twice as much as that for a 22-core Intel. To my knowledge, POWER 9 has 4 threads per core, so that's 88 threads.

[kgonzales]

The benefit and main selling point of these Raptor POWER systems is privacy and security on new & fast hardware. It's unmatched in this category. The prices being charged seem more reasonable when you factor this in.

Exactly this. I need to see if Red Hat or another enterprise Linux vendor will help get this certified, which will then expose it to regular builds and perhaps get attention for compiler optimization

[torsionbar28]

$375, for CPUs from this category, it's relatively inexpensive but in a typically desktop PC, the CPU costs much than the motherboard not viceversa.
But, anyway, overall a starting point Power

At $1475 for mobo and CPU, I'm not sure how this is any different from a Xeon or Epyc workstation build? This POWER mobo is $1100 and $375 for CPU. With Epyc/Xeon you'll spend $375 on the mobo and $1100 on the CPU. I.e., the exact same $1475 total.

I'm definitely ordering one of these Talos 2 Lite boards. Having this much POWER (pun intended) in a commodity ATX board, at a competitive price, has never been done before. For how much hype there is in the open source hardware arena (see ARM, RISC-V, or MIPS), having a company actually deliver the goods makes me really happy.

[Zan Lynx]

If they made one in the Raspberry pi form factor they might get some initial devs to try it out and start developing

It isn't like Power is some new and strange CPU type. Linux has had suppot for PPC since forever. So they don't need a reason to drag in developers.

[edwaleni]

Before any one jumps on the wagon, Raptor is pretty explicit on their website that the Talos boards are for development purposes. There is a list of exceptions that one should read and understand before hand.

Certain components just won't work.

Just making sure people don't lose their heads thinking this is a true AMD/Intel drop in replacement. Raptor does not have a million dollars to cross certify various components.

[Sonadow]

As it is I'm looking forward to get myself a full, 2CPU, Talos II system in a year or half

I was looking to get one but I have my doubts about how useful it will be as a personal computing machine. For the reasons stated below:

It isn't like Power is some new and strange CPU type. Linux has had suppot for PPC since forever. So they don't need a reason to drag in developers.

That's just the kernel. What about the software?

The way I see it, no one knows whether most FOSS software that we take for granted on x64 distributions can be properly built on ppc64el (or ppc64le, depending on how you see it).

Can I build a fresh tarball of Libreoffice from TDF without having to patch the sources?
Can I do the same for Firefox? For VLC? For FFMPEG? For OpenJDK? What about applications and libraries that depend on x86 and x64 assembly instructions through YASM and NASM? can they still be built on ppc64le or will the compile just simply fail?

So far the answer to these questions is a huge 'No' or 'I don't know'. Remember, I'm buying a computer do do my stuff on it. Not find ways to get stuff working. Non-programmers like me should be able to simply grab a tarball and do a simple ./configure make make install (or their cmake / meson / etc equivalents) on FOSS without fighting with library or compiler or platform errors.

That alone disqualifies just about every computing platform that is not x64 for typical personal computing,

[Zan Lynx]

I was looking to get one but I have my doubts about how useful it will be as a personal computing machine. For the reasons stated below:



That's just the kernel. What about the software?

The way I see it, no one knows whether most FOSS software that we take for granted on x64 distributions can be properly built on ppc64el (or ppc64le, depending on how you see it).

Can I build a fresh tarball of Libreoffice from TDF without having to patch the sources?
Can I do the same for Firefox? For VLC? For FFMPEG? For OpenJDK? What about applications and libraries that depend on x86 and x64 assembly instructions through YASM and NASM? can they still be built on ppc64le or will the compile just simply fail?

So far the answer to these questions is a huge 'No' or 'I don't know'. Remember, I'm buying a computer do do my stuff on it. Not find ways to get stuff working. Non-programmers like me should be able to simply grab a tarball and do a simple ./configure make make install (or their cmake / meson / etc equivalents) on FOSS without fighting with library or compiler or platform errors.

That alone disqualifies just about every computing platform that is not x64 for typical personal computing,

I am currently listening to my Talos II running its fans up and down. I have the source code so I suppose that I should try to fix that. Heh. Or check for a firmware update.

But anyway, I currently have Fedora 28 PPC64LE installed on it. I haven't run into any broken software yet. I have used it to build some pretty complicated C++ code, and Go code and it seems to run Rust well too.

Your idea of being able to just run "./configure && make" and have it work perfectly is simply not realistic. Every time that you update a support library or the compiler, things are going to break. I used to run Gentoo. I know.

So far the PPC64 distributions don't seem to have any worse problems than x86_64 or ARM. Especially since you can run the little-endian variants of PPC64 on Power9 with no performance drop.

Anyway, LibreOffice works. Firefox works. OpenJDK and Java definitely works (remember IBM runs these things and they're big on Java). I can't find any information on FFMPEG so you're probably out of luck there.

Yes, software that relies on assembly code is probably not going to work unless someone has been fixing it up for PPC.

[grok]

Perhaps Firefox is slower? (much slower at running javascript, fast at everything else). The one thing I can imagine is there's no JIT compiler for PPC64le in Firefox (is there one?). If you're concerned by firmware philosophy there's a good chance you might be running NoScript anyway. Or trying LibreJS would fit in there.

I wonder about chromium as well, and "apps" like Visual Studio Code and others.

--------------------

I'm sure most things build, or most things that are in a particular distro's repository built and worked. Afterall I did install Ubuntu on an old iMac once. The first thing I struggled with was how to turn the Mac on, I think it had a power button on the keyboard or some such. The next hard thing was how to enter the "BIOS" or have it boot from CD/DVD (you have to press 'C'). Then it was a zero effort affair but there was no flash player which was still needed back then.

[navigator]

hi

https://my.mixtape.moe/wcdrde.png