Raptor Is Going To Launch A New POWER9 Linux System

Raptor Engineering who does Coreboot development work and is known for their previous Talos Secure Workstation system to provide a fast and fully libre workstation is going to be launching a new POWER-based workstation.

Meet the Talos II. Raptor Engineering is teasing the Talos II workstation, which they say will not rely upon crowdfunding unlike the earlier effort and will also cost "far less" than the original Talos. Pre-orders are to open next month while they say this POWER9 system should be shipping in Q4. Details shared so far are dual IBM POWER9 CPUs, five PCI-E slots, fully owner controllable, and workstation performance at competitive pricing.

For now is this fairly basic pre-release page. Raptor Computing Systems is manufacturing and shipping these PCs with Raptor Engineering and IBM having worked out the motherboard design.

Some additional details on the Talos II that were relayed to us ahead of the formal announcement include onboard SATA 3.0, dual serial, onboard 2D VGA, USB 3.0, and dual Gigabit Ethernet. They will also have an option for shipping these POWER9 systems with AMD workstation graphics hardware using the open-source driver stack while NVIDIA compute accelerators will also be an option.

It will be interesting to see how these free software focused POWER9 systems are priced when they are officially announced in August. I'll work on getting remote access to a Talos II workstation for running some Linux benchmarks.