POWER8 Workstation Launches On Crowdfunding: $4k For Motherboard, $18k For System

The Talos Secure Workstation that we previously have covered on Phoronix has now launched on crowd-funding where they hope to raise close to four million dollars to make this POWER8 system that's free down to the firmware a reality.

The Talos Secure Workstation aims to be a high performance, free software system. Months ago we did run some benchmarks and write more about it. Now it's to the stage the design is firming up and they are looking to crowd-funding to actually make it happen at scale.

Raptor Engineering describes Talos on CrowdSupply as, "The world's first ATX-compatible, workstation-class mainboard for the IBM POWER8 processor." The motherboard is expected to work with Libreboot.

The $3k price talked about in past articles is no longer accurate but now the pricing is $4,100 USD for the ATX motherboard, a heatsink, and other basic motherboard accessories. Basically, like a retail motherboard. The CPU isn't included. POWER8 CPUs start out at $1,135 USD for the eight-core 130 Watt model or up to $3,350 USD for the 12-core 190 Watt CPU.

For $18,000 USD they are offering the complete Talos Workstation as a 12-core POWER8 CPU, 256GB of DDR3 ECC RAM, AMD FirePro or NVIDIA Tesla graphics, SAS disks for storage, and a pre-installed copy of Debian or CentOS.

Over the next 60 days they hope to raise $3.7 million to make it happen, so far they've raised $55,100 of which nine people so far have bought the motherboard and one person has ordered a complete system.

Does this system interest you? Do you have $4k for a motherboard and another $1k+ for the CPU or $18k for a fully free software workstation? If so, head on over to CrowdSupply.com to check it out. (If you also have the room in your lofty budget, consider joining Phoronix Premium to help support the site and our efforts of Linux hardware testing and benchmarking.)