POWER8 Talos Workstation Drops Price Slightly, Long Way From Being Funded

[CrystalGamma]

torsionbar28 and starshipeleven, you do realize that caligula was joking (I hope at least), right?

As for the crowdfunding campaign, one thing that is important to emphasize is that the CPU is actually pretty competitively priced (aka as expensive as the Xeons it competes with performance-wise).
Of course the board is pretty expensive, but consider that the campaign goal would only cover the price of 1000 units. There is not a lot of economy of scale you can make use of at that level of production.

As mentioned in The Linux Link Tech Show episode referenced on the crowdfunding page, a significant number of pledges in the $10 tier may make a difference even if the campaign fails by showing IBM and their partners (who can fund board development more easily than Raptor Computer Systems) that there is a market for this kind of computer.

[starshipeleven]

microcontrollers have different purpose, they can't run linux

I was comparing Raspi Zero (the DIMM module) with microcontrollers. Given what it is usually used for, a microcontroller is also 100% fine.

FYI atmel/Arduinos can operate ethernet, use wifi and read from SD cards. Not terribly fast, but for most embedded projects where a Raspi Zero might make sense, it's fast enough.

I'm also unsure how "cannot run linux" is an issue. They don't need linux in there, their firmware is a single C++ (with some C++ features missing) program.

[torsionbar28]

As for the crowdfunding campaign, one thing that is important to emphasize is that the CPU is actually pretty competitively priced (aka as expensive as the Xeons it competes with performance-wise).
Of course the board is pretty expensive, but consider that the campaign goal would only cover the price of 1000 units. There is not a lot of economy of scale you can make use of at that level of production.

I agree that the POWER8 cpu's are price competitive with Xeon, no qualm there. I do think their model is flawed however. The product may well be excellent, but it's priced like a piece of enterprise equipment. A high end Xeon or Opteron board is $500. This board is nearly $4k. Enterprise pricing is fine if you're selling to enterprise customers, but they're selling this via crowdfunding. It's a mismatch. Enterprises don't buy into crowdfunding campaigns, and hobbyists and home users don't buy $4k motherboards.

IMO they should sell a hobbyist edition board for $1200 and they'd easily get 1000 orders. Also give a few away to prominent open source developers to foster good will and jump start the porting of distros. And partner with Red Hat (who already sells and supports RHEL on POWER via their IBM partnership) to sell a complete server and workstation solution to enterprise customers.

[starshipeleven]

torsionbar28 and starshipeleven, you do realize that caligula was joking (I hope at least), right?

caligula has never joked in the past, he seems genuinely naive.

As mentioned in The Linux Link Tech Show episode referenced on the crowdfunding page, a significant number of pledges in the $10 tier may make a difference even if the campaign fails by showing IBM and their partners (who can fund board development more easily than Raptor Computer Systems) that there is a market for this kind of computer.

I really doubt IBM will ever give a damn, sadly.

They are active in the high and very high end server market for specific applications (that are optimized for POWER), making entry-level boards for a few hippies that can't pay a few measly thousand dollars for a board makes no sense from their POV.

[starshipeleven]

IMO they should sell a hobbyist edition board for $1200 and they'd easily get 1000 orders. Also give a few away to prominent open source developers to foster good will and jump start the porting of distros. And partner with Red Hat (who already sells and supports RHEL on POWER via their IBM partnership) to sell a complete server and workstation solution to enterprise customers.

Dropping features won't drop price much, sadly. Here the issue is short mass production runs, only way is making larger runs somehow, or accepting to sell at a loss for a while.

[Delgarde]

I agree that the POWER8 cpu's are price competitive with Xeon, no qualm there. I do think their model is flawed however. The product may well be excellent, but it's priced like a piece of enterprise equipment. A high end Xeon or Opteron board is $500. This board is nearly $4k. Enterprise pricing is fine if you're selling to enterprise customers, but they're selling this via crowdfunding. It's a mismatch. Enterprises don't buy into crowdfunding campaigns, and hobbyists and home users don't buy $4k motherboards.

Even aside from that, it's also a very small market - how many people are actually prepared to spend four grand on a high-end workstation? Sure, there used to be a good market for such things, back in the days of Sun and SGI - but it's not coincidence that neither of those companies is still around, with most of their customers preferring to save money by buying high-end Intel-based PCs instead. Enterprise spends a lot of money on servers... not so much on workstation hardware anymore.

[Min1123]

Wrong, most people don't give a fuck and just want a development board that has a large community. Being Open or Libre is a prerequisite usually but most people don't search for them.

et al.

You seem angry, you should calm down or get that looked at.

Many of your statements reiterate what I was saying, but angrier.

The one I feel the need to clarify is this:

I wouldn't call "starting to use x86 stuff" as "falling apart".

I didn't say anything about x86. I don't like x86, but I didn't say that. Freescale was unwilling to spend money on R&D for PPC while they were supplying the PPC processors for all of Apple's portables. So IBM chips were being used by Apple in their desktops and were 64-bit and faster, the laptop chips were getting no new versions. That meant that Apple could make newer better desktops, but they couldn't even get their laptops onto the same PPC64 arch. This meant their fat binaries (a.out binaries that have multiple archs supported in the same file) could only run the PPC32 and not the newer PPC64 at all. So Apple went shopping and Intel made them an offer they couldn't refuse. Better process technology and Intel would replace Apple's in-house hardware design team by making motherboards for them, so Apple did it.

And now PPC is in routers and in servers, and not in desktops or laptops. The middle is gone.

[starshipeleven]

Many of your statements reiterate what I was saying, but angrier.

No, many of my statements state that what we have and is kinda "libre" is a total piece of shit and should be treated as such, not enshrined because "libre" like you seem to do. Especially EOMA68 which is a monument to bad design and manages to be worse than raspi even if the SoC it uses is better.

I also clarify that any person asking "please make it cheaper" only shows he knows little of the true costs of hardware. x86 boards are affordable only because heavy mass-production, this is more or less equal in features, but has nowhere near the same production run size, therefore price is orders of magnitude higher, it's normal and expected and not something they can really do anything about.

I also correct you on the CPU price, as they aren't selling these boards with unaffordable CPUs.

Let's not claim bullshit just because I show emotions in my text.

I didn't say anything about x86.

You said "It was when Freescale stopped dumping money into research that Apple started falling apart."
Apple didn't fall apart in any way, shape or form. Their adoption of x86 processors was a big huge win for them, just look at the sales figures.

Better process technology and Intel would replace Apple's in-house hardware design team by making motherboards for them, so Apple did it.

Intel does not make motherboards for anyone, and when they did they weren't terribly better than average. Apple still has damn good design teams making the motherboards, just like they have damn good engineers for chassis and other stuff in general.

And now PPC is in routers and in servers, and not in desktops or laptops. The middle is gone.

It's not that common in routers or NAS either, as far as new stuff goes, it's pretty much phased out by mips/ARM in the low end, and by ARM in the higher end (and by x86 in the microserver-like-thingy-NAS segment).

[H3g3m0n]

I'm not too keen on the Power architecture (OpenPower). It bills itself as being 'open' but any cursory look at it shows that it's little more than a cross-company IP pool, kind of like MPEG-LA and H.264.

Read though the OpenPOWER summit slides and you frequently see things like: "All of these technologies will be made available to our partners". You need to be a member of the foundation to even download the ISA pdf. I also would have concerns about how much control IBM have over the 'open' platform and the OpenPower Foundation.

Granted that's better than a totally closed Intel system.

I'm eagerly awaiting RISC-V where the only restriction is the trademark/logo if your not a member passing a conformance.

[Midler]

Why not lease it for 5yrs 300€/month?