4 ms·

Is there any chance this will reach normal mortals? Looking at the Basic Talos II motherboard and CPU bundle, that's already 3480 USD. If you want to get into t

Is there any chance this will reach normal mortals? Looking at the Basic Talos II motherboard and CPU bundle, that's already 3480 USD. If you want to get into the powerpc architecture your only option is second hand systems or be lucky enough to have this hardware in your workplace?

classichasclass 5y ago
T2 Lite and Blackbird are certainly less expensive options. Still, the major cost is the logic board because there are no economies of scale (but the CPU cost, compared core to core and cache to cache, is actually competitive with x86: IBM makes those in rather more volume than Raptor and others manufacture OpenPOWER boards).
numpad0 5y ago
POWER in uppercase had always been for clustered mainframes and full depth racked servers
zozbot234 5y ago
> Looking at the Basic Talos II motherboard and CPU bundle, that's already 3480 USD. That's quite competitive with AmigaOne once you account for the far better performance you get with the Talos. Run a free AROS operating system on the board and you've got a great, future-proof machine for all sorts of uses.
R0b0t1 5y ago
It's achievable (for most people I suspect frequent HN, anyway) if you put away a couple months of disposable income. If you don't care about playing games on it it's about the same cost as a high end gaming computer, and what games were you gonna play anyway?
- samus 5y ago
  If the virtualization story is good, it might still work out. The only concern is the graphics accelerations part. That hardware could be fully handled by the VM though too.
  - R0b0t1 5y ago
    Drivers work, there's just no games. So if you want to train ML models go for it.
andrewf 5y ago
Maybe https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog/services/power-systems-virtual-server https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog/services/power-systems-virtual... ? The pricing calculator says 0.5 cores and 32GB RAM is ~$310/month, billed in increments of $0.43/hour. (Pricing seems to be, approximately $10 / GB / month for RAM)

classichasclass 5y ago

T2 Lite and Blackbird are certainly less expensive options. Still, the major cost is the logic board because there are no economies of scale (but the CPU cost, compared core to core and cache to cache, is actually competitive with x86: IBM makes those in rather more volume than Raptor and others manufacture OpenPOWER boards).

numpad0 5y ago

POWER in uppercase had always been for clustered mainframes and full depth racked servers

zozbot234 5y ago

> Looking at the Basic Talos II motherboard and CPU bundle, that's already 3480 USD. That's quite competitive with AmigaOne once you account for the far better performance you get with the Talos. Run a free AROS operating system on the board and you've got a great, future-proof machine for all sorts of uses.

R0b0t1 5y ago

It's achievable (for most people I suspect frequent HN, anyway) if you put away a couple months of disposable income. If you don't care about playing games on it it's about the same cost as a high end gaming computer, and what games were you gonna play anyway?

samus 5y ago
If the virtualization story is good, it might still work out. The only concern is the graphics accelerations part. That hardware could be fully handled by the VM though too.
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  Drivers work, there's just no games. So if you want to train ML models go for it.

andrewf 5y ago

Maybe https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog/services/power-systems-virtual-server https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog/services/power-systems-virtual... ? The pricing calculator says 0.5 cores and 32GB RAM is ~$310/month, billed in increments of $0.43/hour. (Pricing seems to be, approximately $10 / GB / month for RAM)