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

[HokTar]

I'm digging this!

What I'd need at work is:
-- fedora
-- nvidia driver (yep, spoiling the freedom right there but we develop in cuda...)
-- water block for the cpu.

Any idea if these are somehow working?

[kpedersen]

A really cool machine. If I was in the market for something quite powerful, I would very likely give this a serious look.

Tbh, I might see if I can get my work to buy me one. This machine is just about cheap enough to qualify for this.

[Fanboy80]

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.

Are you talking about the compatibility list? https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Talos...atibility_List

[carewolf]

I fear that "day-to-day" software optimization will always be a problem with POWER machines. It already was a big problem when PowerPC was the main CPU of Apple computers. Compilers generated worse code, JIT-compiler did not exist or were much slower, SIMD optimization is missing in most software...

On of the interesting things they did with PowerPC recently in gcc (8 I believe), is provide SSE intinsic headers that generate Altivec/VMX instructions instead. That way they could be able to use code optimized for SSE though I haven't checked how well it works.

[freespirit]

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.

i've some question to people own talos pc

is debian stretch or buster easy to install as on x86? or there is some complications?
firefox work fine as x86 or there is some issue/differences?
virt-manager, lucky backup, qbittorrent and kdenlive do work properly?

as normal user who care about privacy and security, i do not have special skills, do you think a talos could be just a x86 valid and easy replacment, or do i consider something else?

i hope someone could answer because i find really hard to find an answer on it

[darkbasic]

I am currently listening to my Talos II running its fans up and down.

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

Congratulations for buying such an awesome system.

[lilos]

It will good if Talos had user forum to help users !

[Sonadow]

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

Are these self-compiled, or installed from a package repository?

[Licaon]

From their Lite page:

This is an unprecedented level of access for any modern workstation- or enterprise-class machine, and one that is increasingly needed to assure safety and compliance with new regulations, such as the EU's GDPR.

nice namedrop!

[pavlerson]

A really cool machine. If I was in the market for something quite powerful, I would very likely give this a serious look.

Tbh, I might see if I can get my work to buy me one. This machine is just about cheap enough to qualify for this.

Eh.... Have anyone of you looked at the benchmarks? The POWER9 is so slow in comparison to x86 it is not even funny. Here Phoronix benchmark two 8-core POWER9 cpus vs x86 and POWER9 is.... slooooow.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-epyc-xeon&num=1