Talos II POWER9 Workstation With OpenBMC, PCI-E 4.0 Up For Pre-Ordering

[-MacNuke-]

I really love the aspect, that it is open source down to the CPU microcode. The problem is that it starts as a full blown workstation. Yes the price is comparable to an Intel workstation with all that ECC registered memory (look at the price, the memory costs more than the CPU), redundant and large power supply and such things but it is far from "affordable" or "cheap".

There is no sound chip I guess?

If IBM wants software optimization for their CPUs in most Open Source Software they should make a more affordable variant. Since IBM has no interest in the consumer market anymore this will not happen. And if you are not running some special software optimized for POWER CPUs like SAP or something like that these things are probably slow as hell for this price and power consumption.

[M@GOid]

Do you actually know anything about hardware cost? To begin, the POWER9 CPU's are a LOT more powerful then anything on the AM3+ platform. It's the first motherboard with PCIe 4 expansion, has 2 CPU slots, lots of ECC ready RAM slots, redundant power supply's and probably the kitchen sink. You want brand new server gear at consumer prices? That's just impossible. That and the CPU's don't cost much considering what you're getting.

You just made my point. People don't know how much it costs, because it is not something you see on hardware reviews on the net or on Amazon/Newegg, so is easy to ask big money for it.

Obviously is much more powerful than a AM3+ platform, no doubt about that. But that power also comes at the cost of what software are available for it.

In the end, they are providing freedom of blobs for the rich, because if you are poor, you must be a insane follower of Stalman to drop $2300 on something just because you are afraid of binary blobs.

[Dawn]

Funny to see all the "it's too expensive!" posts. Me and my co-founder were floored by how cheap this is - bear in mind, it's a two-socket machine.

We're almost certainly getting at least one and probably multiple of these systems - but not until IBM releases the Power9 user's manual publicly. Their refusal to do that until launch is kind of predictable but still irritating.

[Michael_S]

Do you actually know anything about hardware cost? To begin, the POWER9 CPU's are a LOT more powerful then anything on the AM3+ platform. It's the first motherboard with PCIe 4 expansion, has 2 CPU slots, lots of ECC ready RAM slots, redundant power supply's and probably the kitchen sink. You want brand new server gear at consumer prices? That's just impossible. That and the CPU's don't cost much considering what you're getting.

Benchmarks on the Power9 aren't out yet, are they? It's reasonably sure they're a big upgrade over AM3+ systems. It's less sure whether they are enough of an upgrade to justify $2300 for a server-class motherboard and CPU combo.

[rene]

Well, I would really love, really love^3 to get one of those systems, but the price is really not that great. For that money I probably would rather get an AMD Epyc and probably get more and future proof number number crunching, …

[Michael_S]

In the end, they are providing freedom of blobs for the rich, because if you are poor, you must be a insane follower of Stalman to drop $2300 on something just because you are afraid of binary blobs.

When it comes to hardware, 'trickle-down' is a real thing. The hot new features - multi-core computer processors, power windows on cars, high resolution screens on smart phones, different brew levels on coffee makers, robotic vacuum cleaners - start out as expensive luxury items, and then as the manufacturers get more efficient at making them they become more and more cheap and more and more common until base models have them.

So from that angle, this is no different and not surprising. Raptor Engineering is a small company. They don't have economies of scale like Dell or HP. They probably don't even have economies of scale like System76 or ZaReason.

And in order to provide something that's performance competitive without Intel's IME or AMD's PSP, Raptor has to go to the Power9, which isn't aimed at the consumer market. $2300 for a server-class motherboard and processor isn't that wild at all.

If you want high performance on free software, it's now the only game in town. No insanity required - just a lot of money.

[torsionbar28]

$2300 is $2000 more than the average dude is able to spend on something like this.

You're joking right? It wasn't that many years ago when a typical consumer desktop PC or laptop was $2000+. The 486 I bought in 1994 cost more than $2k, and I was pretty poor at the time, so I went down to the bank and applied for a loan to buy it. Heck, even today, a "gamer" pc can easily exceed $2k. Have you priced a Macbook Pro or Mac Pro lately?

Compare this to any Xeon workstation from Dell or whoever, and $2300 is cheaper than the comparable Xeon system. This is a powerful workstation with ECC memory, it compares directly with Xeon and Opteron (soon Epyc) based workstations. What world do you live in, where such systems cost even less than this one does??

What, did you think this machine is for grandma to check her dial-up AOL account from the trailer park? Sounds like maybe a Raspberry Pi is more your speed.

[jabl]

Yeah, the competition for this isn't a budget PC from the nearest department store. What does an equivalently equipped 2S Xeon Skylake system cost?

[edwaleni]

Funny to see all the "it's too expensive!" posts. Me and my co-founder were floored by how cheap this is - bear in mind, it's a two-socket machine.

We're almost certainly getting at least one and probably multiple of these systems - but not until IBM releases the Power9 user's manual publicly. Their refusal to do that until launch is kind of predictable but still irritating.

OpenPOWER released the spec documentation (POWER ISA v3.0B) on their site back in March.

https://openpowerfoundation.org/?resource_lib=power-isa-version-3-0

Go for it!

[Michael_S]

torsionbar28

To be fair, people today aren't spending that kind of money. My kid put together a screaming 1920x1080 resolution gaming machine with all new parts for $550 earlier this year. Admittedly that's not 4K resolution and it was before the GPU price spike from cryptocurrency miners. But most gamers these days fall in the budget range. If you buy off-the-shell prebuilt gaming systems you might spend $800 or $900 for an equivalent machine. The people dropping $2000 on a gaming rig or workstation are a rarity. (Edit: my first computer in 1996 was a $2800 Pentium 1 machine, and it was low end at the time. Today you don't need to spend $2800 to get entry level performance.)

Plus, the $2300 is the motherboard and processor. The whole workstation with all components is $6350.

I went to abmx.com - which is where my last employer did their datacenter shopping - and select a more or less equivalent set of hardware except with Xeon processors the base option is around $4200. That's for 2 low end Intel Xeon E5-2603v4s (12 cores, 12 threads, 30MB cache, 1.7GHz). https://www.abmx.com/dual-xeon-works...edundant-power If you upgrade to, for example, 2 Intel Xeon E5-2643v4s (12 cores, 24 threads, 40MB cache, 3.4GHz) then you're at $7630.

So the question is where that Power9 chip falls compared to the different Xeon offerings in performance per dollar and performance per watt.