6 ms·

> Well, the local machines are coming, it's totally feasible to have a Blackbird at home and host at IntegriCloud… Yeah but there's a HUGE but: the motherboard

by mshook 7y ago

> Well, the local machines are coming, it's totally feasible to have a Blackbird at home and host at IntegriCloud… Yeah but there's a HUGE but: the motherboard and CPU (1S/4C/16T) and heatsink alone are $1.4k, no RAM no case no HD no nothing (I found a guy who spec'ed one for $2.1k with everything you'd need for a reasonable workstation). So unless you have a massive good reason or interest (political, because POWER, your company runs on POWER, "f*ck" x86, ...) to run your code on POWER, I don't see why you'd spend that much while you could get better for a lot less. And the only way it'll get cheaper is to mass produce it: let's be realistic, as much as I'd want to have a POWER workstation or laptop (hey, there were SPARC and Thinkpad PowerPC laptops so why not), I won't be holding my breath while I wait...

floatboth 7y ago
Yeah, I already mentioned that because of that price, my "fuck x86" machine is ARMv8 :) (okay, not only because of the price, also because I just like the A64 ISA and UEFI) The SolidRun MACCHIATObin is not nearly as powerful — it's ultrabook-grade performance, not server-grade — but it works fine for coding & browsing, and it's also quite open — the only blob in the firmware is something tiny and irrelevant (and I'm pretty sure for some secondary processor), everything on the ARM cores post-ROM (including RAM training code) I have built from source.
throwaway2048 7y ago
That's more expensive than an x86 equivalent system, but hardly outrageously more so.
- floatboth 7y ago
  Well, the CPUs are in the same ballpark (<500 bucks for the 4-core POWER9 ~= launch price of the Ryzen 7 1800X) but the boards are outrageous — $1100 for the Blackbird is almost twice as expensive as ridiculous E X T R E M E boards like the ASUS ROG ZENITH EXTREME for Threadripper (and a normal decent board for desktop Ryzen is in the $250 area). Yeah, it's low volume and Raptor needs to pay their employees — but $1100 for a mainboard? Come on. Maybe they should have dropped PCIe Gen 4 from the Blackbird at least.
  - Koshkin 7y ago
    > outrageous... ridiculous... Enough people are buying, which means the price is just right (Capitalism 101).
    - floatboth 7y ago
      Enough to not bankrupt Raptor just now, but not enough to make POWER actually popular, which would provide them much more customers in the future.
  - tpearson-raptor 7y ago
    I think you are overlooking one of the main reasons for avoiding Intel and AMD -- the ME and PSP, respectively. Intel or AMD has a master "skeleton" key that can basically unlock any of their computers post-sale, while simultaneously using that key to ensure that you cannot modify, replace, or remove the black box firmware in question. If you trust Intel and AMD, without an SLA, to keep your data private all I'll say is that's quite naive. Even the HDMI master key leaked, do you really expect the ME and PSP signing keys not to fall into the wrong hands at any point? Yes, the mainboards are expensive. That's the price of making them blob-free and still retaining high performance. Blackbird lowers that barrier to entry some as well. Again, Rome has a mandatory PSP blob that cannot be removed (any UEFI toggles that say otherwise are not accurate -- the PSP must run before the x86 cores even come out of reset). If you're OK with that loss of control, my gut impression is that use of Linux etc. is just being done to avoid Microsoft licensing fees, not because of security or owner control concerns ;). At that point, why not just lease cloud space on a major provider that can offer that compute power even cheaper than a local machine which sits idle overnight?
    - floatboth 7y ago
      I know you like to play up the privacy angle in your marketing… that wouldn't work on me. I mostly work on public/FOSS stuff, about the only really private data on my PC is my access credentials. I don't want them stolen, but someone targeting me with a low-level exploit for them is a ridiculous moonshot scenario, they're a million times more likely to leak from the actual service itself. > local machine which sits idle overnight um, I thought we're talking about workstations here. I power mine off when unused. > use of Linux etc. is just being done to avoid Microsoft licensing fees, not because of security or owner control concerns This is based on two rather odd assumptions: - Microsoft as the default: No, I grew up with Unix, Unix is my default choice just because I know it and I'm used to it; - owner control on all levels being equally important: meh, there's a lot more that you'd want to tweak in the kernel and up the stack. I wouldn't know what to change in firmware. I have changed many little things in the FreeBSD kernel (and contributed them). The only thing I ever changed in the UEFI firmware on my ARM box is some ACPI tables to fix compatibility. > That's the price of making them blob-free and still retaining high performance That sounds vague ;) Also, what's "high performance" about the board anyway? PCIe Gen 4? On a typical developer workstation that's kind of a waste, Gen 3 is plenty.

by mshook 7y ago

floatboth 7y ago

Yeah, I already mentioned that because of that price, my "fuck x86" machine is ARMv8 :) (okay, not only because of the price, also because I just like the A64 ISA and UEFI) The SolidRun MACCHIATObin is not nearly as powerful — it's ultrabook-grade performance, not server-grade — but it works fine for coding & browsing, and it's also quite open — the only blob in the firmware is something tiny and irrelevant (and I'm pretty sure for some secondary processor), everything on the ARM cores post-ROM (including RAM training code) I have built from source.

throwaway2048 7y ago

That's more expensive than an x86 equivalent system, but hardly outrageously more so.

floatboth 7y ago
Well, the CPUs are in the same ballpark (<500 bucks for the 4-core POWER9 ~= launch price of the Ryzen 7 1800X) but the boards are outrageous — $1100 for the Blackbird is almost twice as expensive as ridiculous E X T R E M E boards like the ASUS ROG ZENITH EXTREME for Threadripper (and a normal decent board for desktop Ryzen is in the $250 area). Yeah, it's low volume and Raptor needs to pay their employees — but $1100 for a mainboard? Come on. Maybe they should have dropped PCIe Gen 4 from the Blackbird at least.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  > outrageous... ridiculous... Enough people are buying, which means the price is just right (Capitalism 101).
  - floatboth 7y ago
    Enough to not bankrupt Raptor just now, but not enough to make POWER actually popular, which would provide them much more customers in the future.
- tpearson-raptor 7y ago
  I think you are overlooking one of the main reasons for avoiding Intel and AMD -- the ME and PSP, respectively. Intel or AMD has a master "skeleton" key that can basically unlock any of their computers post-sale, while simultaneously using that key to ensure that you cannot modify, replace, or remove the black box firmware in question. If you trust Intel and AMD, without an SLA, to keep your data private all I'll say is that's quite naive. Even the HDMI master key leaked, do you really expect the ME and PSP signing keys not to fall into the wrong hands at any point? Yes, the mainboards are expensive. That's the price of making them blob-free and still retaining high performance. Blackbird lowers that barrier to entry some as well. Again, Rome has a mandatory PSP blob that cannot be removed (any UEFI toggles that say otherwise are not accurate -- the PSP must run before the x86 cores even come out of reset). If you're OK with that loss of control, my gut impression is that use of Linux etc. is just being done to avoid Microsoft licensing fees, not because of security or owner control concerns ;). At that point, why not just lease cloud space on a major provider that can offer that compute power even cheaper than a local machine which sits idle overnight?
  - floatboth 7y ago
    I know you like to play up the privacy angle in your marketing… that wouldn't work on me. I mostly work on public/FOSS stuff, about the only really private data on my PC is my access credentials. I don't want them stolen, but someone targeting me with a low-level exploit for them is a ridiculous moonshot scenario, they're a million times more likely to leak from the actual service itself. > local machine which sits idle overnight um, I thought we're talking about workstations here. I power mine off when unused. > use of Linux etc. is just being done to avoid Microsoft licensing fees, not because of security or owner control concerns This is based on two rather odd assumptions: - Microsoft as the default: No, I grew up with Unix, Unix is my default choice just because I know it and I'm used to it; - owner control on all levels being equally important: meh, there's a lot more that you'd want to tweak in the kernel and up the stack. I wouldn't know what to change in firmware. I have changed many little things in the FreeBSD kernel (and contributed them). The only thing I ever changed in the UEFI firmware on my ARM box is some ACPI tables to fix compatibility. > That's the price of making them blob-free and still retaining high performance That sounds vague ;) Also, what's "high performance" about the board anyway? PCIe Gen 4? On a typical developer workstation that's kind of a waste, Gen 3 is plenty.