> If "cannot" is truly literal (and it seems so - I can't see Raptor Engineering ever using a "buy an unlock code to enable socket 2" approach) My understandin

> If "cannot" is truly literal (and it seems so - I can't see Raptor Engineering ever using a "buy an unlock code to enable socket 2" approach) My understanding is that the Lite board is essentially the full board, but with the second socket and related components removed from the design to reduce cost. > I'm not aware of anywhere else you can get a POWER9 box Raptor is the only company selling Power in a workstation form factor, and of course they've got the lowest entry price. IBM has the AC922 (https://www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/power-systems-ac922 https://www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/power-systems-ac922) and will be rolling out more models imminently. Several OpenPOWER members (https://openpowerfoundation.org/ https://openpowerfoundation.org/) are also working on their own POWER9 machines. AFAIK, none of them have GAed just yet, but some of the machines were announced at the OpenPOWER summit - https://openpowerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Hardware-Reveal-Flyerv2018-v1.pdf https://openpowerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/H.... There are quite a number of POWER8 machines already on the market. All POWER9 machines use a primarily open source firmware stack, though it does depend on the vendor - vendors will have their own customisations in some cases, and in particular for the BMC firmware. Raptor is also stripping out/manually rebuilding some binary blobs etc. (Disclosure: IBMer, I don't speak for IBM or Raptor.)