3 ms·

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 Bl

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.
  - tpearson-raptor 7y ago
    While the machines off it is a paid for resource that is unused. A cloud provider would lease that resource (so to speak) to someone else during that time, meaning in theory they can provide lower cost than you will ever see unless you can somehow get the hardware cheaper than they can. Good providers will still allow you to run an accelerated VM inside the leased VPS, so you could still do your kernel hacking there. I'm simply saying there's something interesting here -- you care enough about owning (I use that term loosely) a machine to spend more on a local system, but not enough to obtain one that you can freely modify as desired. Clearly there is a threshold, and I'm curious where it lies. :)
    - floatboth 7y ago
      The threshold is not spending all my savings on an additional computer "for science" :) > accelerated VM inside the leased VPS Does that work on POWER? > they can provide lower cost They can but they won't. They like having huge profits. Even if they offer the base VPS for cheap (Spot instances) they rip you off on storage, bandwidth, IP addresses, etc. Also, again, desktops. I like developing directly on a desktop workstation. I can't exactly insert my Radeon into a PCIe slot in the cloud and run a DisplayPort cable from the cloud to my monitor :)

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.
- tpearson-raptor 7y ago
  While the machines off it is a paid for resource that is unused. A cloud provider would lease that resource (so to speak) to someone else during that time, meaning in theory they can provide lower cost than you will ever see unless you can somehow get the hardware cheaper than they can. Good providers will still allow you to run an accelerated VM inside the leased VPS, so you could still do your kernel hacking there. I'm simply saying there's something interesting here -- you care enough about owning (I use that term loosely) a machine to spend more on a local system, but not enough to obtain one that you can freely modify as desired. Clearly there is a threshold, and I'm curious where it lies. :)
  - floatboth 7y ago
    The threshold is not spending all my savings on an additional computer "for science" :) > accelerated VM inside the leased VPS Does that work on POWER? > they can provide lower cost They can but they won't. They like having huge profits. Even if they offer the base VPS for cheap (Spot instances) they rip you off on storage, bandwidth, IP addresses, etc. Also, again, desktops. I like developing directly on a desktop workstation. I can't exactly insert my Radeon into a PCIe slot in the cloud and run a DisplayPort cable from the cloud to my monitor :)