Raptor Computing Reveals More Details About Their Blackbird Low-Cost POWER9 Board

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Raptor Computing Reveals More Details About Their Blackbird Low-Cost POWER9 Board

This week at the OpenPOWER Summit Amsterdam, Texas-based libre computer vendor Raptor Computing Systems announced Blackbird as a low-cost, micro-ATX POWER9 motherboard to be available in the coming months. The company has now revealed some additional details...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raptor-Blackbird-Details

[Michael_S]

My current box is an AMD FX-8320, so one of these would probably be a lateral move or possibly upgrade. But one thing that concerns me: https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Talos...Graphics_Cards - looks like GPU support is wonky. That's worrisome. I don't expect to game on the thing, but I was planning on upgrading to a 4k monitor and it's not clear to me how well it would handle it. I currently have an RX480 and that and my storage would be the only things I hoped to carry over from my existing box.

[coder]

This is great, but I was hoping for just a normal ATX board. I like the Talos II Lite, but I want a more case-friendly ATX form factor and a more sane PCIe setup. 4 DIMM slots would be fine, but I want to run quad-channel memory with an 8-core CPU.

That said, I still don't know if I can justify a non-x86 workstation, at this point.

[darkbasic]

If they manage to sell it a 300$ I think they will sell a lot of them. Since they will have to compete against the new Ryzen 12 cores IBM needs to lower the CPU prices as well. Good times are ahead.

[coder]

If they manage to sell it a 300$ I think they will sell a lot of them. Since they will have to compete against the new Ryzen 12 cores IBM needs to lower the CPU prices as well.

No, that's a Threadripper, requiring a more expensive TR4 motherboard. Also, I doubt there's much overlap in the market segments they address - I found exactly 1 micro-ATX TR4 board. Most people are not getting a TR4 to put in that form factor, whereas there are good reasons you might want to put a POWER CPU in one. Basically, most people running x86 in a micro-ATX form factor wouldn't use a ThreadRipper for it.

And IBM's prices are meant to be comparable to EPYC and Xeon SP, which I think they generally are.

Anyway, I feel like trying to have POWER compete on price/performance (at this scale) is missing the point. POWER servers need to have a competitive value proposition, but you don't buy these desktops/workstations simply on the basis of price/performance.

[lilos]

If they manage to sell it a 300$ I think they will sell a lot of them. Since they will have to compete against the new Ryzen 12 cores IBM needs to lower the CPU prices as well. Good times are ahead.

I don`t care for Ryzen at all knowing they have spy ARM cpu inside no coreboot nothing is open !
IBM will win again !

[tuxd3v]

A 1000 price tag will kill the project by half..
I am also following the development of System76...they talk about powercells...does it come with a power too?
I would like to see a arm chip from eMAG ampere 16 cores on it!

[darkbasic]

No, that's a Threadripper, requiring a more expensive TR4 motherboard.

I'm not talking about Threadripper, I'm talking about the new mainstream Ryzen they're going to launch in a few months. Since CCX will have 6 cores instead of 4, Ryzen will have 12 instead of 8.

[Ray54]

How practical would a Power 9 based PC be as your regular desktop? Is there full Linux OS support with Ubuntu, Fedora or something else? Is there a GNU compiler port and any X86 binary compatibility tools at all? Will I be able to do the basics of emails, write documents and surf the web. I remember the problems that game developers apparently had with Playstation 3 game development, but that may have been with the other parts of the system than the Power PC CPUs. I would very much like a non-X86 desktop again (had SUN workstations in the past).

[coder]

I'm not talking about Threadripper, I'm talking about the new mainstream Ryzen they're going to launch in a few months. Since CCX will have 6 cores instead of 4, Ryzen will have 12 instead of 8.

I didn't see that announcement, but they did just announce 12-core ThreadRipper 2000-series CPUs.

Anyway, the point stands - you don't buy POWER for desktop/workstation/NAS because it's the most cost-effective solution, so it's a bit misguided to suggest that they should even try to compete on price. They don't have the volumes or demand needed to win that war, so it'd be doomed from the outset.

The cost merely needs to be within reach of those who want their systems for other reasons.