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Talos II
- freekh 9y agoLooks interesting, I didn't even know that you still could buy PowerPC she. Anyone know of pros and cons?
- dom0 9y agoPOWER was historically the architecture for "I don't care about efficiency, I just want a fast machine!". This hasn't really changed. For some applications they are still substantially faster than any x86 system, but they're almost always far less power efficient. That's why they're not widely adopted in data centres.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoThat may be a con for a data center or battery-powered device, but not so much for a workstation.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoThat may be a con for a data center or battery-powered device, but not so much for a workstation.
- cat199 9y ago> That's why they're not widely adopted in data centres. I don't think that's the entire picture.. If you're running systems at full capacity, throughput vs power consumption becomes a relevant equation - e.g. if the chip runs code 2x faster but is 1.5x less power efficient, I'm still saving .5 of power to get the same data processed.. Not sure of power consumption specifics for POWER, but they've been about to 4x faster than PC for some workloads.. E.g. 4GHz CPU + giant cache and 4x the registers will tear through matrices like a hot knife in butter... Also, there's the question of density vs performance - e.g. I only need X sq units of datacenter to process this dataset within the timewindow.. Also, historically the only people 'needing' power and willing to pay for it were companies with deeper pockets who wouldn't mind shelling out for AIX and the rest of the IBM stuff that goes along; linux is to some extent an 'afterthought'/'second tier' OS for this market though that has been changing in last few years. People using IBM or AIX have typically tended towards being risk averse and have been on POWER for ages; for everyone else, people haven't wanted to spend the money to migrate to a platform controlled by one company, etc.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rwmj 9y agoPrices starting at $4,750 [sic]: https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/purchase.html https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/purchase.html
- krylon 9y agoThat price does not include RAM or a GPU. Even a bare bones motherboard costs more than $2,000. I have no doubt this an awesome machine, but that price puts it outside my budget range. :(
- wott 9y agoThe price of the mainboard is almost divided by 2 compared to Talos 1, but the workstation bundles are as expensive or even more. I bet it will fail as Talos 1 did, for the same reason: way too expensive for what it is, for the concerned/hobbyist audience, leaving it for a tiny part of the professional audience... which is not ready either to put their trust in an unreliable project and prefers safe bets.
- PeCaN 9y agoThat's par for the course for a workstation. Actually on the affordable end, which is surprising given that it's using POWER9 which I figured would be expensive (by virtue of not being x86).
- krylon 9y agoIt depends, I think. Compared to the RISC based propietary Unix workstations of 20 years ago, the price is really good. At work, our CAD people have machines that are in the € 1,000 - € 1,500 price range. Those machines are fairly big and powerful, at least compared to our regular desktop PCs. It is possible to spend more money on a workstation, if one wants or needs to, and get a more powerful machine. Far more. Depending on your use case, our CAD machines might be lightweights. But the amount of computing power you can get for € 1,000-1,500 these days is insane compared to the landscape 20 or even 10 years ago. I am certain the Talos II offers good performance for its price. My point was that I would like to have a machine that comes without any opaque blobs or "management engine", but I am not going to spend that much money on it. I'd be happy go get such a machine in the € 500-1,000 price range at correspondingly lower performance.
- vectorEQ 9y agoTalos™ II drives the state of the art of secure computing forward. Talos™ II gives you — and only you — full control of your machine's security. Rest assured knowing that only your authorized software and firmware are running via POWER9's secure boot features. Don't trust us? Look at the secure boot sources yourself — and modify them as you wish. That's the power of Talos™ II. That is fkin nice to be honest. There is so few which do this. totally already worth the price. (open source bios/boot procedures etc.). It's a total mess trying to get such a setup on a x86 server machine. i think there is a grand total of 1 server board which support coreboot (?)
- samstave 9y agoI just learned about laptops from a Bay Area company yesterday: purism HTTPS://puri.sm Coreboot based laptops...
- olympus 9y agoThe main criticism against Purism laptops is that they still contain proprietary blobs (from Intel) in the coreboot payload. We have no way of knowing what's in those blobs. Purism tries to be free, and is a step up from other vendors, but doesn't go far enough for some people.
- samstave 9y agoThanks for the info... what's a better/the best option? Also, this is a laptop, so a diff class than server/desktop models - so may not be fair to even compare them ?
- nextos 9y agoThe very best option right now (and dirty cheap, ~$200 new) is to get an Asus C201P / Flip Chromebook. It uses a Rockchip ARM CPU, and if you disable 3D acceleration (which is slow anyway) and use an external wireless antenna, you don't have any closed firmware in your computer. Not even CPU microcode firmware. This is unique. Of course, it's a machine targeted by Libreboot: https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/c201.html https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/c201.html I guess that if you install GuixSD, given all binary packages can be verified against the source, and there are some decent sandboxing facilities you can get pretty great security.
- bitL 9y agoHow would this compare to a ThreadRipper/EPYC system? Any advantages in favor of Talos?
- rekado 9y agoDo you not consider the freedom aspects (e.g. sources to the secure boot implementation, no x86, etc) as advantages in favour of Talos?
- eeks 9y agoHuge memory BW, CAPI2, 8-way SMT, 120MB L3 cache, L4 cache, compression and crypto coprocessor, etc...
- CrystalGamma 9y ago
- arca_vorago 9y agoI have been keeping an eye on Raptor and Talos for a while now, and it's super exciting to see another cpu-platform with security and openess in mind. As a GNU+Linux guy, has anyone had any experience with GNU+Linux on the Power platform? What kind of differences could I expect. I've been itching to build a new AMD Naples 64 core (2x cpu) server, but I have to admit I'm tempted to just do AMD Ryzen for my upcoming desktop build and do a Talos II for the server.
- pedrocr 9y agoI was curious as well and it seems the latest Ubuntu LTS has POWER8+ as a supported architecture[1]. Debian should also run just fine I imagine. Hopefully someone else has actual experience on how it runs. [1] https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/installation-guide/ppc64el/ch02s01.html#idm46127827825152 https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/installation-guide/ppc64el/ch02s...
- cat199 9y agoNo idea recently, but even back in the apple PPC days pretty much everything worked. The things that didn't were typically lesser used desktoppy things or more community written software that didn't take endianness into consideration. If you're not afraid to dig into sources alot of things only took adding an endianness hack / byteswap to certain lines to make things work properly. Also to check into are some languages/compilers/interpreters simply might not have a backend for your CPU. If you use any of these critically you might double check; common things like perl/python/java/ruby should be fine. I'd expect most server-side / computation oriented things should be fine- desktop, etc, not so sure especially since noone is making any power based workstations these days, though remote GUI mgmt is still useful in some annoying cases Overall stability, barring per-platform issues should be fine as well. basically, if you don't mind getting your hands a bit dirty from time to time, it should be okay; not sure of support for this particular board / firmware/ etc though.. hopefully someone with recent experience can confirm
- jabl 9y agoMost Linux work for modern POWER seems to be for the ppc64le target, which runs the CPU in little endian mode. That being said, there's probably a lot of libraries with x86-64 ASM kernels in them which will run slower if they have to use the generic C/whatever version on power.
- gbrown_ 9y agoOnly 4 core CPUs, a tad disappointing.
- ju-st 9y agoWhat is their performance?
- Symmetry 9y agoIIRC they're a bit better than an Intel core on a single threaded load with some variance depending on the workload. But going from 1 to 2 threads per core increases the Power 9's throughput by 80% instead of the 20% you expect with an Intel core. And you can go up to 8 threads per core for something like 120% the total throughput of 1 thread. All those numbers for threads per core are also highly workload dependent. The more cache misses the more SMT helps.
- torpcoms 9y agoCan you give a source, or was this personal testing?
- aseipp 9y agoPOWER CPU cores typically have N-way hardware threads, like 8 or so usually. So you're probably looking at something closer to 32 hardware threads per socket. The original Talos offered 12 core variants (96 per socket!) but had no dual socket config. Also, the memory bandwidth and cache on these things is insane even compared to top of the line, absolute highest-end Xeons, so there are many factors besides raw CPU count. I don't know if those numbers are upped with a POWER9 CPUs (I wasn't even sure if POWER9 was really shipping yet?)
- torpcoms 9y agoIt is; the question is, can you put the 24-core chips from IBM in the same socket? For that matter, what on earth is the socket name for POWER9 (or POWER8)?
- mariuolo 9y agoI wish I could afford one.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- CrystalGamma 9y agoI applaud them for pricing the board at around $2000 (though with the CPUs it's obviously more expensive). This sits squarely within my budget for a high-performance and trustworthy workstation like this (even accounting for taxes). However I would also have payed for faster CPUs (up to ~$1000 each for an 8- or 12-core processor). Does anyone know if all POWER9 processors fit into that socket, and if yes, if there is anyone selling POWER9 in retail quantities (preferably in Europe). Another question that isn't answered on their page is the payment options. Like many fellow Europeans I don't have a credit card, so if that is the only way to pay, I'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to buy this. I wonder how much power this system will consume on idle? I read IBM significantly improved the power management with POWER9, so here's hoping 8 cores of this won't take significantly more than the 110W idle of my 8-core Piledriver system.
- X86BSD 9y agoPower 9? Last I looked no one was even selling power 8 on the retail scale. Tyan had some finished? Systems kind of sort of available? And that was it. I thought IBM had stated they wanted to challenge and take Intel on in the data center and cloud space. But they sure are not doing a very good job. Sham because the hardware is a breath of fresh air.
- haneefmubarak 9y agoI'm stateside, but I've had lots of success paying for things online and at places in person that want a credit card by just giving my debit card (and not saying anything, ofc). That being said, YMMV.
- e12e 9y agoIt seems they're not all that interested in marketing to end users, despite the talos ii "bare-bones" kit available for pre-order on the site - I couldn't find any reviews of the previous talos I/power8 system online - i would assume they'd at the very least get someone like anadtech, ars or one of the many Linux journals to do some hands-on testing / free marketing? I mean, if I had too much cash, I'd be tempted to get one, but I'd probably be even.more likely if I could see some blender rendering benchmarks and Linux kernel compile timings etc...
- wmf 9y agoI don't think Talos I was ever released. They created a backlash last time by hyping an unavailable and unaffordable product so maybe the low-key approach is better.
- e12e 9y agoI don't know, if they don't have any units the can give out to do tests on at this point, what are the odds that the whole thing isn't another round of vapourware? I hope I'm wrong. [ed: That is to say, if they couldn't get the one tested because it didn't exist, they should be twice as hard at work getting the mk II tested - and I can't see any evidence of that either.]
- CrystalGamma 9y agoThere was a crowdfunding campaign, but it failed. This new product however can be directly preordered (and for much lower price: the board costs little more than half of what Talos 1 would have and the CPUs they are offering right now cost about a quarter of the cheapest option back then)
- nesukun 9y agoI won't get anywhere near it considering what happened to the first Talos http://prey.wikia.com/wiki/Talos_I http://prey.wikia.com/wiki/Talos_I
- Cieplak 9y agoWill it support FreeBSD? Of course it would run it, but I don't have time anymore to write my own device drivers.
- pedrocr 9y ago>Like many fellow Europeans I don't have a credit card, so if that is the only way to pay, I'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to buy this. I find this surprising. At least in Portugal it's now common to buy stuff online with a credit card, either with an actual card or with one of those simple services the bank provides where they generate a virtual card on demand for you to use for a single purchase.
- dEnigma 9y agoAnecdotal of course, but here in Austria I know a lot of people without credit cards (myself included). The people who own credit cards are mostly frequent travellers, since it's easier to buy plane tickets if you have one (I was lucky enough to always have had at least one person with a credit among my travel partners, so I could just pay them by bank transfer or in cash later). AFAIK no one in my close family circle has a credit card. edit: According to the Austrian National Bank the number of issued credit cards in Austria was 2,85 mio. in 2012, compared to 8,5 mio. debit cards (population: 8.747 million (2016)), and the amount of credit cards was growing rapidly. Seems like there are more people with credit cards than I thought. https://www.oenb.at/en/Payment-Processing/Card-Payments/Cards.html https://www.oenb.at/en/Payment-Processing/Card-Payments/Card... edit2: Statistics Austria has the percentage of households with credit cards at 53% in 2014 http://www.statistik.at/web_de/statistiken/menschen_und_gesellschaft/soziales/ausstattung_privater_haushalte/021850.html http://www.statistik.at/web_de/statistiken/menschen_und_gese... (German, it's the bottom row)
- 4ad 9y agoI also live in Austria. People look at me very weird when I try to pay with Visa/Mastercard credit cards at retail shops rather than using the worthless Maestro debit cards. I don't have any friends who have credit cards. The real problem here has nothing to do with credit cards though, but with the unavailability of Visa/Mastercards debit cards in many European countries. For example, in my home country, Romania, very few people have credit cards, possibly even less than in Austria (edit: after your edit, definitely less), but everybody has a Visa/Mastecard debit card. No such thing in Austria. I heard that even in Germany it's hard to get a Visa/Mastercard debit card. People don't want credit cards for various reasons, that's fine, although personally I don't agree with their reasoning, but Visa/Mastercard should still be available as a platform rather than being restricted to credit cards.
- qubex 9y agoDespite the high cost (when compared to 'comparable' x86_64 hardware) I am very excited by this. However I'm concerned by desktop Linux support and graphics driver support. It would be really miserable to get this kind of machine and then have a lacklustre desktop experience (though I'd be using it as a high-horsepower workstation, it would need to be able to dump computations onto the GPU and use ordinary free productivity software on the side).
- CrystalGamma 9y agoGiven that they're selling systems with AMD cards in them, I would imagine that AMDGPU/RadeonSI at least would very well.
- JohnZi 9y agoThey had a video of playing Unreal Tournament (the new one) on a Talos 1 with a AMD card. As long as a card with Open Source driver support gets used it should work mostly fine. Back then they need a 4line patch to play ut4.
- onli 9y agoTo set on PCI-E 4.0 is a mistake. PCI-E 5.0 is right around the corner. It might be backward compatible, but if you buy it for that it would be better to wait.
- bryanlarsen 9y agoETA for PCI-E 5.0 in consumer equipment is 2020 or 2021. That's actually fairly quick considering that PCIE 4.0 is just starting to trickle out, but I wouldn't call that "right around the corner". I do expect many providers to skip PCI-E 4.0. OTOH the delta from 4 to 5 is a lot smaller than the delta from 3 to 4, so running PCI-E 4 is also a good mechanism for getting a head start on 5.
- pepijndevos 9y agoI seem to remember some similar board based on RISC, anyone know what I'm thinking of?
- wmf 9y agoThere have been some Freescale PowerPC boards in recent years.
- SkyMarshal 9y agoThis is excellent, glad to see these guys trying again. They attempted a crowdfund of this project a year or two ago and didn't raise enough, which was a huge disappointment. Hope the second try is the charm.