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I'd love to see at least one affordable developer-focused workstation available from someone. Power9 will be cool. EDIT: And by cool, I mean have interesting p

I'd love to see at least one affordable developer-focused workstation available from someone. Power9 will be cool. EDIT: And by cool, I mean have interesting performance characteristics, not be Intel arch, and seems to be one of the more plausibly not-backdoored CPUs in this performance class.

jandrese 9y ago
Affordable has historically been a big sticking point for Power based systems. They are very much in the "enterprise pricing" domain and well outside of the reach of mere mortals.
dragontamer 9y ago
> affordable developer-focused workstation https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/ https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/ Pre-order prices seem to be $4.2k+ USD. That's pretty "affordable" for Power.
- jandrese 9y ago
  Looks like $5k is the minimum for a system that could actually boot (has HDD and memory). Affordable by enterprise computing standards, but you could buy a really kicking Intel based desktop for that money. I'm guessing a 90W 4 Core Power9 is not going to knock it out of the park compared to an i7-8700k. It is hard to justify spending a lot more for a slower machine that most software won't run on without a recompile. You have to place a whole lot of value on the secure boot features.
  - dragontamer 9y ago
    From a performance perspective... the minimum-spec'd version doesn't make much sense at all. Especially since the 18-core Power is only $1290: https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/CP9M06/purchase.html https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/CP9M06/purchase.html It is a dual-socket motherboard though. So fully-decked out with 2x 18cores gets you to $9k or so. But really, the point of a developer machine is to be an accessory to a Power9 server. You develop on the "cheap" $5k developer machine, and then run things on the production $10k+ machine. So you basically want to build a test environment that would emulate your bigger machine: dual socket (match the NUMA with the bigger box), even if the CPUs are a lot smaller.

jandrese 9y ago

Affordable has historically been a big sticking point for Power based systems. They are very much in the "enterprise pricing" domain and well outside of the reach of mere mortals.

dragontamer 9y ago

> affordable developer-focused workstation https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/ https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/ Pre-order prices seem to be $4.2k+ USD. That's pretty "affordable" for Power.

jandrese 9y ago
Looks like $5k is the minimum for a system that could actually boot (has HDD and memory). Affordable by enterprise computing standards, but you could buy a really kicking Intel based desktop for that money. I'm guessing a 90W 4 Core Power9 is not going to knock it out of the park compared to an i7-8700k. It is hard to justify spending a lot more for a slower machine that most software won't run on without a recompile. You have to place a whole lot of value on the secure boot features.
- dragontamer 9y ago
  From a performance perspective... the minimum-spec'd version doesn't make much sense at all. Especially since the 18-core Power is only $1290: https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/CP9M06/purchase.html https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/CP9M06/purchase.html It is a dual-socket motherboard though. So fully-decked out with 2x 18cores gets you to $9k or so. But really, the point of a developer machine is to be an accessory to a Power9 server. You develop on the "cheap" $5k developer machine, and then run things on the production $10k+ machine. So you basically want to build a test environment that would emulate your bigger machine: dual socket (match the NUMA with the bigger box), even if the CPUs are a lot smaller.