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This is great! I’ve been hoping someone — IBM or one of it’s partners like Raptor or Gigabyte — would make a lower-end POWER8/9 system available. The price of t

This is great! I’ve been hoping someone — IBM or one of it’s partners like Raptor or Gigabyte — would make a lower-end POWER8/9 system available. The price of this board ($1K) is much more affordable for a hobbyist developer who wants to tinker with POWER, try porting some open-source projects, etc.

microcolonel 8y ago
Yeah, this is what was exciting about the HiFive Unleashed: it's an actual Linux-capable RISC-V board with standard peripherals. The only downside is that it's about $4,000USD, all-told.
mrweasel 8y ago
The price is a little high, sadly. I don't blame them, it can't be that cheap to design and produce, and it really is what I would like to see as a desktop option. I mean it really sucks that we cry for non-X86 desktops, and when someone finally delivers, we complain about price. It's just little hard to justify for something I'd basically buy as a "toy".
- bradfa 8y ago
  The price isn't THAT high! Compare to an Intel 16 thread CPU + motherboard with ECC RAM and the ability to address more than 64GB of RAM. You're well into Xeon parts probably in the $300-400 range just for the CPU, then to get a decent motherboard is probably another $200. So you're paying a 2x premium for this Raptor Computing offering, that's really not THAT bad of pricing! This pricing is an order of magnitude better than some of the previous Raptor Computing POWER systems which will hopefully open up their market to a wider audience and help drive down prices in the future.
  - mrweasel 8y ago
    That's true, I didn't really considered what the same money would buy me in x86 hardware. Still I think the point is that many of us would like something like a Power9 for our desktop, but we honestly don't need that level of hardware, so we hope for something around half price to justify buying what is essentially a luxury item.
  - lunchables 8y ago
    I agree, compared to x86, it is not that bad. I think the problem is, most people would have to buy this instead of their primary PC instead of a secondary machine to play with. That's a really big commitment for a lot of people. I genuinely hope this takes off, I would love to replace my primary desktop with a power system. And any way you slice it, this is just _AWESOME_.
  - wpietri 8y ago
    Could you say more about what you see yourself as getting for that 2x premium? Skimming articles it sounds like the POWER9 line's main attraction is the potential for higher performance?
    - nickpsecurity 8y ago
      There's two, main attractions for Raptor: 1. All Intel and AMD CPU's are backdoored with management processors running black box software that's already had vulnerabilities. They refuse to remove the backdoors for consumer segment for probably shady reasons. These POWER CPU's have open-source firmware, OpenBMC, which is a little better on trust side. Personally, I think they're still backdoored somehow since IBM is one of NSA's longest-running partners. Still a risk reduction if we go from anyone might hit this closed software to open software anyone can analyze and improve. https://hackaday.com/2017/12/11/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-intel-management-engine/ https://hackaday.com/2017/12/11/what-you-need-to-know-about-... 2. People that want POWER ISA or just a RISC ISA at x86's performance. The x86 ISA is pretty horrible to some of us. It also locks you into specific patterns of execution, like its stack architecture, that can make it harder to efficiently implement alternative schemes. POWER could be more flexible for alternative designs. 2.1. PowerPC, like sold by NXP/Freescale, is still used in a lot of safety-critical fields along with sections of the embedded sector. While invisible to desktop programmers, it kept getting better and better for niches like with QorIQ CPU's for telecoms. I speculated developing on a POWER architecture for POWER-like targets might be easier somehow (idk though). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QorIQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QorIQ 2.2. The separation kernels like INTEGRITY-178B were all originally designed for PowerPC boards like Curtis-Wright makes for aerospace and military. They might be easier to port in evaluated configuration to a Raptor than to x86. There are also a lot of hardware/software architectures for improving security that work better when you know what the hardware is doing in the first place and/or can modify the firmware. OpenPOWER has more potential for these designs with the main drawback being CompSci folks usually not able to afford expensive, new computers. Somebody might port an existing idea, though, that they were doing on MIPS, Leon3, ARM, etc. 2.3. The Amiga people also use PowerPC-based machines. They're willing to pay a premium to maintain their nostalgia. Wouldn't surprise me if someone ports MorphOS or something like that to these machines. So, there's a few ideas.
  - tjoff 8y ago
    Keep in mind that this board only has two ram slots. Having more than 64 GB of ram will cost twice as much as the motherboard+cpu.
    - nrki 8y ago
      It support 2 x 128GB DIMMs, though :)
  - ac29 8y ago
    Intel Quad Core Xeon's with ECC and >64GB RAM support are more like $250: https://ark.intel.com/products/134858/Intel-Xeon-E-2134-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4-50-GHz- https://ark.intel.com/products/134858/Intel-Xeon-E-2134-Proc... Those are "only" 8 threads, but I doubt the 16 thread/4 core POWER processors are much better in practice than Intel's 8 thread/4 core processors.
- nickpsecurity 8y ago
  The price is low compared to the high-end, low-volume, RISC workstations of the past. Those started at around five digits. On the not-quite-as-performant end, there's even more ARM solutions showing up. Escaping Intel and increasing ecosystem diversity has never been cheaper. Sure it costs something, though.

microcolonel 8y ago

Yeah, this is what was exciting about the HiFive Unleashed: it's an actual Linux-capable RISC-V board with standard peripherals. The only downside is that it's about $4,000USD, all-told.

mrweasel 8y ago

The price is a little high, sadly. I don't blame them, it can't be that cheap to design and produce, and it really is what I would like to see as a desktop option. I mean it really sucks that we cry for non-X86 desktops, and when someone finally delivers, we complain about price. It's just little hard to justify for something I'd basically buy as a "toy".

bradfa 8y ago
The price isn't THAT high! Compare to an Intel 16 thread CPU + motherboard with ECC RAM and the ability to address more than 64GB of RAM. You're well into Xeon parts probably in the $300-400 range just for the CPU, then to get a decent motherboard is probably another $200. So you're paying a 2x premium for this Raptor Computing offering, that's really not THAT bad of pricing! This pricing is an order of magnitude better than some of the previous Raptor Computing POWER systems which will hopefully open up their market to a wider audience and help drive down prices in the future.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  That's true, I didn't really considered what the same money would buy me in x86 hardware. Still I think the point is that many of us would like something like a Power9 for our desktop, but we honestly don't need that level of hardware, so we hope for something around half price to justify buying what is essentially a luxury item.
- lunchables 8y ago
  I agree, compared to x86, it is not that bad. I think the problem is, most people would have to buy this instead of their primary PC instead of a secondary machine to play with. That's a really big commitment for a lot of people. I genuinely hope this takes off, I would love to replace my primary desktop with a power system. And any way you slice it, this is just _AWESOME_.
- wpietri 8y ago
  Could you say more about what you see yourself as getting for that 2x premium? Skimming articles it sounds like the POWER9 line's main attraction is the potential for higher performance?
  - nickpsecurity 8y ago
    There's two, main attractions for Raptor: 1. All Intel and AMD CPU's are backdoored with management processors running black box software that's already had vulnerabilities. They refuse to remove the backdoors for consumer segment for probably shady reasons. These POWER CPU's have open-source firmware, OpenBMC, which is a little better on trust side. Personally, I think they're still backdoored somehow since IBM is one of NSA's longest-running partners. Still a risk reduction if we go from anyone might hit this closed software to open software anyone can analyze and improve. https://hackaday.com/2017/12/11/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-intel-management-engine/ https://hackaday.com/2017/12/11/what-you-need-to-know-about-... 2. People that want POWER ISA or just a RISC ISA at x86's performance. The x86 ISA is pretty horrible to some of us. It also locks you into specific patterns of execution, like its stack architecture, that can make it harder to efficiently implement alternative schemes. POWER could be more flexible for alternative designs. 2.1. PowerPC, like sold by NXP/Freescale, is still used in a lot of safety-critical fields along with sections of the embedded sector. While invisible to desktop programmers, it kept getting better and better for niches like with QorIQ CPU's for telecoms. I speculated developing on a POWER architecture for POWER-like targets might be easier somehow (idk though). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QorIQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QorIQ 2.2. The separation kernels like INTEGRITY-178B were all originally designed for PowerPC boards like Curtis-Wright makes for aerospace and military. They might be easier to port in evaluated configuration to a Raptor than to x86. There are also a lot of hardware/software architectures for improving security that work better when you know what the hardware is doing in the first place and/or can modify the firmware. OpenPOWER has more potential for these designs with the main drawback being CompSci folks usually not able to afford expensive, new computers. Somebody might port an existing idea, though, that they were doing on MIPS, Leon3, ARM, etc. 2.3. The Amiga people also use PowerPC-based machines. They're willing to pay a premium to maintain their nostalgia. Wouldn't surprise me if someone ports MorphOS or something like that to these machines. So, there's a few ideas.
- tjoff 8y ago
  Keep in mind that this board only has two ram slots. Having more than 64 GB of ram will cost twice as much as the motherboard+cpu.
  - nrki 8y ago
    It support 2 x 128GB DIMMs, though :)
- ac29 8y ago
  Intel Quad Core Xeon's with ECC and >64GB RAM support are more like $250: https://ark.intel.com/products/134858/Intel-Xeon-E-2134-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4-50-GHz- https://ark.intel.com/products/134858/Intel-Xeon-E-2134-Proc... Those are "only" 8 threads, but I doubt the 16 thread/4 core POWER processors are much better in practice than Intel's 8 thread/4 core processors.
nickpsecurity 8y ago
The price is low compared to the high-end, low-volume, RISC workstations of the past. Those started at around five digits. On the not-quite-as-performant end, there's even more ARM solutions showing up. Escaping Intel and increasing ecosystem diversity has never been cheaper. Sure it costs something, though.