Raptor Talos II POWER9 Benchmarks Against AMD Threadripper & Intel Core i9

[classichasclass]

I bet it comes with horrid noisy enterprise fans though. Wonder if it's possible to jury-rig a closed loop cooler onto it with some modified brackets. We gotta get Stephen Burke one of these!

165W is still a lot at idle. I assume you're only running the usual suspects (browser and a couple terminals?)

When it first arrived, the fans were quite noisy, almost intolerable. This was quickly corrected. Recent firmwares aren't any louder than any of my other systems, and visitors to the house don't notice it's on. The fans really only roar on startup.

Right now I have Firefox open with 51 tabs, four terminals, VLC playing music and a text editor. When I'm building Firefox it goes up to about 180W. The highest I've recorded from it is 212W on IPL, which throttles down shortly after bootup (compare to the quad G5 sitting next to it, which pulls around 230W at idle on reduced power).

Cameron Kaiser

[freespirit]

As i wrote in another topic, there is almost no info on applications, so people who care about open source and use it as workstation is confused about it. Popular application test is needed, i suggest to use debian because is on of more popular distro, and other popular distro is based on it.
I think ibm and raptorcs should try to work with popular app devs to make it compatibe much as possible, or with major distro, because people is scared about spend a ton of money without know if their needed program work correctly, and not everyone know how to compile programs or patch it.
In my opinion more info on application is needed and before blackbird will be released ibm and raptor should invest money to work on popular app fixes to work out of the box in linux distro.
It feels frustrating to spend tousand dollars for a machine who cannot run apps will a 500 x86 will do.
I hope they will learn from windows mobile failure, no apps no party, i think in the post Snowden era the market of open source hardware could just grow and people are interested on it, but programs must work out of the box

[Yoshi]

freespirit first I thought you were right but after thinking about it again, it seems not that easy. With the Talos Workstation developers are able to get access to POWER9 systems for a decent price. Now they are able to patch/port the missing stuff to POWER9. And AFAIR RaptorCS offers (free?) access to their VPS for developers of "important" apps. I think madscientist159 wrote about that in another topic.

[starshipeleven]

"The Talos II power consumption during this task was about a 400 Watt average." That's more then my ageing dual-core Apple "IBM 970MP" G5, … where can I sight up? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU1RK4TR-GA ;-)

It's a dual CPU board running 2 CPUs.

[freespirit]

freespirit first I thought you were right but after thinking about it again, it seems not that easy. With the Talos Workstation developers are able to get access to POWER9 systems for a decent price. Now they are able to patch/port the missing stuff to POWER9. And AFAIR RaptorCS offers (free?) access to their VPS for developers of "important" apps. I think madscientist159 wrote about that in another topic.

You are right but i think will be not enough, i understand raptorcs have limited resources, they should push ibm to do that or at least try to do something more. The competition is high and usually the winner is a mix of low cost and funtionality, in this kind of market, at least for open source entusiast the price could be a bit higher, but no one can handle with funtionality issue, o can spend a bit more but i cannot leave programs i need, at least the more famous like firefox, libre office, virt manager, vlc etc

[rene]

It's a dual CPU board running 2 CPUs.

I know, it was internally written a little bit funny to make your day, and I would actually be interested in a new, higher performance PPC64 hardware ;-) https://t2sde.org/hardware/desktop/A...tion/Apple/G5/

[darkbasic]

Long term it would be great if AMD would provide open firmware for their GPUs and compute cards, so that either it could be flashed to the GPU itself or shipped as part of the base firmware image, but AMD has publicly stated they cannot do so at this time.

Everybody would love that. Hopefully Intel's discrete GPUs won't require proprietary firmware, but I wouldn't bet on it.

[anemusek]

Besides being fully open-source, the Talos II is also manufactured in the US with the IBM POWER9 processors being fabbed in New York while the Raptor motherboard is manufactured in Texas along with where their systems are assembled.

For 95% people on the world there is disadvantage.

[ruthan]

Could it run Crysis through Qemu or Wine?

[torsionbar28]

Nice results, but until more applications get a proper upstream port to POWER that does not require making extensive patches to the code it's not even up for consideration as a desktop or workstation.

Upstream Chromium sources are still unbuildable on POWER. Ditto upstream Libreoffice and Firefox. And a bunch of other applications I use on a regular basis.

This was the case for a while, even for x86_64, when that was the new thing. It'll come.