IBM

An OpenPOWER workstation for about $3100. That's just under what I paid for my quad G5 new, so this is not a bad price at all. I've signed up for notification of preorders.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc ... 00000.html
https://raptorengineeringinc.com/TALOS/prerelease.php

Anybody know anything about these guys? This sounds pretty damn good. (Yes, BYO case/RAM/etc. That's no biggie.)

ha, a new risc workstation. haven't seen that in a while and it feels oh so good
didn't see anything about the os tho. does aix run there?

I doubt it. I imagine this is Linux and I'm sure one of the BSDs will get on it soon.

ah too bad. doesn't make much sense then

Well, it's the use case: if the desire was a cheaper AIX workstation, I don't think this was ever intended to serve that purpose. If the desire is a more modern POWER-based (or even just non-x86) workstation, then I think it does. The price premium doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Sure, you could get a Linux workstation for much less, but for me what matters is under the hood.

ClassicHasClass wrote: Well, it's the use case: if the desire was a cheaper AIX workstation, I don't think this was ever intended to serve that purpose. If the desire is a more modern POWER-based (or even just non-x86) workstation, then I think it does. The price premium doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Sure, you could get a Linux workstation for much less, but for me what matters is under the hood.

well both matters. i see no sense in having non-x86 hardware for running linux (big irons from sgi or cray aside although i'd like to see something custom on these too). a linux which i may add has a number of disadvantages compared to x86 linux (same goes for bsd). it's not like the risc machines beat the crap out of an ordinary peecee anymore as it's been back in the day so there has to be a good reason.
the major plus of proprietary stuff is the combination of a great machine and a professional, custom taylored os. as soon as one of the two is missing it doesn't make much sense anymore assuming what's left isn't way above everything else.

No, I dispute that. I don't think proprietary Unix is necessarily a selling point myself. Maybe it's because I already have the hardware, but I don't like not knowing what IBM or Snoracle is doing in that black box they call a kernel and I don't have any tools around it.

I enjoy Irix, I like AIX, I can tolerate Solaris, I used to like OS X. But for AIX in particular I've gritted my teeth that it's more and more locked down, with needing HMCs to do anything now and APARs behind service contracts and paywalls. In that context, I don't think a non-x86 Linux is a disadvantage (I don't mind building my own binaries), especially on a platform this open, and a 12-core POWER8 is hardly small potatoes. Server-grade ARM so far has been a bust and SPARC workstations died off years ago. If we're going to actually have choices in the architecture we buy instead of CPUs we don't know what the hell they're up to, then people need to pony up for things like this.

Anyway, I think we're fundamentally disagreed on this point, but I hope enough orders come in for them to do a production run. I'm actually budgeting for two.

ClassicHasClass wrote: Anyway, I think we're fundamentally disagreed on this point, but I hope enough orders come in for them to do a production run. I'm actually budgeting for two.

hehe yeah seems so but either way i do hope that takes off as well of course. getting back some variety to the hardware maket is crucial since monocultures are always bad in many ways

It looks great. I can imagine several good uses for such machine.

It's a bit expensive for me, unfortunately

Yep, to much money for me to splurge for a thing that I will use as a "toy".

Workstation eh? Might need decent graphics adapter support. Are there open source drivers for AMD/NVIDIA (or other notable) graphics on POWER/PPC?

Yes, though not good ones, AIUI. But that improves with a bigger userbase and hopefully the unit will be attractive to a certain class of user (crazy and rich ).

Sacrifist wrote: Workstation eh? Might need decent graphics adapter support. Are there open source drivers for AMD/NVIDIA (or other notable) graphics on POWER/PPC?

Open source drivers: yes. But if I understand correctly, the claim to fame of this platform is "open", "owner controllable" etc etc. So no binary firmware blobs. Good luck finding an AMD/NVIDIA graphics card without those.

It seems the specific design of the IOMMU would prevent malicious firmware on the card from getting back into the full address space, though I don't think anyone's tested that. The Phoronix thread talks about it a little (see below).

Since I last pimped this mercilessly, Raptor has dropped the price to a flat $3000 and there are now some early benchmarks up from them and Phoronix -- which means it actually does exist, at least in prototype form. The current rumour is that they'll need 2000 requests to do a production run. I sent them an E-mail to clarify, but haven't heard back yet. I'll just link my blogpost, since there are a number of links in it.

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2016/02/ ... ower8.html

I got followup mail from Raptor: "We are rapidly approaching the interest level required to make Talos a reality."

Currently the pricepoint is $2700 for the mo'bo', heatsink and I/O plate. Unfortunately, the CPU is now being sold separately. The baseline 8-core 130W POWER8 part is $1000, so total base cost is $3700 plus whatever options you want to add. I'm assuming the price change is based on exactly how many interest entries they got.

I'm still planning to pick up two and replied to the included link with a reservation for two, though I'll only build out one and use the other as spare parts. I'm interested to see what they'll sell the 12-core 190W part for. They are not accepting money yet, but will be taking deposits soon with the rest payable prior to shipping.

Could AmigaOS or MorphOS (runs on PPC macs) run on this?

necron2600 wrote: Could AmigaOS or MorphOS (runs on PPC macs) run on this?

Potentially in big-endian mode, but you'd still need to have platform support for what's on board, and I don't know if the motherboard supports anything but little-endian POWER8 (given that all the supported Linuces are all little-endian).

It's possible they could run in virtualization, though for me Mac OS X would be more useful, since in my case this unit is supposed to be a follow-on from my faithful Quad G5.

If only they'd keep SheepShaver's virtualization support on PPC Linux up-to-date...