4 ms·

What are some of the reasons to buy or use these over Intel or AMD?

classichasclass 1y ago
I bought mine - I own two Talos systems and a Blackbird - because I want choices in ISA, and if people want that, they'll need to spend the money. (It helps that I'm a notorious pro-PowerPC bigot, having used POWER since the RS/6000 MicroChannel days.) Other than ARM, they're the only architecture with both general OS support and processing power in the same ballpark, and while IBM may sometimes be dunderheaded, they aren't going anywhere, either. They aren't cheap and they aren't for everyone. But it meets my needs and it puts my money where my mouth is.
- alchemist1e9 1y ago
  If I understand you correctly it means the primary use case is security applications that need transparency at all levels on a system that is roughly equivalent to mainstream platform performance features. Is that accurate?
  - classichasclass 1y ago
    As I see it, these systems have two potential markets (some natural overlap exists): the first being people like me who don't want to necessarily feed the x86-64 beast if they can avoid it, and the second indeed being people who want a completely auditable, transparent platform. In both cases to be a practical alternative the computer needs to have similar performance to what you'd get from a modern desktop, and while POWER9 is no longer cutting edge, it still generally delivers.
  - gosub100 1y ago
    If I could afford one I would, not because of security, but just the geek in me finds it cool. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, there were several non-x86 architectures that were more powerful, and even 64 bit long before Intel ever did. The DEC alpha, SPARC, and others. I was also too poor to afford those back then but I remember them fondly.
    - rbanffy 1y ago
      > even 64 bit long before Intel ever did. At some point I was reading e-mail on a 64-bit SGI machine while we waited for the Dell the company ordered for me to arrive. The day it came in was one of the saddest days of my life.
Pet_Ant 1y ago
I believe Intel and AMD motherboards all have proprietary firmware and the Talos systems are puritanically open. (But the processor itself is closed so there's that. Could have gone with SPARC Niagara which was open sourced https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/sun-open-sources-second-niagara-chip/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/sun-open-sources-second-... )
- classichasclass 1y ago
  > But the processor itself is closed The microarch is closed and IBM-specific. However, the ISA is open and royalty-free, and the on-chip firmware is open source and you can build it yourself. In this sense it's at least as open as, say, many RISC-V implementations.
  - Pet_Ant 1y ago
    The Sun Niagara 2 even has the Verilog RTL available. That is several orders of magnitude more open than the IBM. > Verilog RTL for OpenSPARC T2 design > Verification environment for OpenSPARC T2 > Diagnostics tests for OpenSPARC T2 > Scripts and Sun internal tools needed to simulate the design and to do synthesis of the design > Open source tools needed to simulate the design https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t2-page.html https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t2-pag...
    - rbanffy 1y ago
      Unfortunately, going from there to an affordable chip with reasonable performance doesn't seem possible.
      - Pet_Ant 1y ago
        Well you could just buy a T2 chip, but I don't know that Sun would sell them outside of an entire system.
        classichasclass 1y ago

I bought mine - I own two Talos systems and a Blackbird - because I want choices in ISA, and if people want that, they'll need to spend the money. (It helps that I'm a notorious pro-PowerPC bigot, having used POWER since the RS/6000 MicroChannel days.) Other than ARM, they're the only architecture with both general OS support and processing power in the same ballpark, and while IBM may sometimes be dunderheaded, they aren't going anywhere, either. They aren't cheap and they aren't for everyone. But it meets my needs and it puts my money where my mouth is.

alchemist1e9 1y ago
If I understand you correctly it means the primary use case is security applications that need transparency at all levels on a system that is roughly equivalent to mainstream platform performance features. Is that accurate?
- classichasclass 1y ago
  As I see it, these systems have two potential markets (some natural overlap exists): the first being people like me who don't want to necessarily feed the x86-64 beast if they can avoid it, and the second indeed being people who want a completely auditable, transparent platform. In both cases to be a practical alternative the computer needs to have similar performance to what you'd get from a modern desktop, and while POWER9 is no longer cutting edge, it still generally delivers.
- gosub100 1y ago
  If I could afford one I would, not because of security, but just the geek in me finds it cool. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, there were several non-x86 architectures that were more powerful, and even 64 bit long before Intel ever did. The DEC alpha, SPARC, and others. I was also too poor to afford those back then but I remember them fondly.
  - rbanffy 1y ago
    > even 64 bit long before Intel ever did. At some point I was reading e-mail on a 64-bit SGI machine while we waited for the Dell the company ordered for me to arrive. The day it came in was one of the saddest days of my life.

Pet_Ant 1y ago

I believe Intel and AMD motherboards all have proprietary firmware and the Talos systems are puritanically open. (But the processor itself is closed so there's that. Could have gone with SPARC Niagara which was open sourced https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/sun-open-sources-second-niagara-chip/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/sun-open-sources-second-... )

classichasclass 1y ago
> But the processor itself is closed The microarch is closed and IBM-specific. However, the ISA is open and royalty-free, and the on-chip firmware is open source and you can build it yourself. In this sense it's at least as open as, say, many RISC-V implementations.
- Pet_Ant 1y ago
  The Sun Niagara 2 even has the Verilog RTL available. That is several orders of magnitude more open than the IBM. > Verilog RTL for OpenSPARC T2 design > Verification environment for OpenSPARC T2 > Diagnostics tests for OpenSPARC T2 > Scripts and Sun internal tools needed to simulate the design and to do synthesis of the design > Open source tools needed to simulate the design https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t2-page.html https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t2-pag...
  - rbanffy 1y ago
    Unfortunately, going from there to an affordable chip with reasonable performance doesn't seem possible.
    - Pet_Ant 1y ago
      Well you could just buy a T2 chip, but I don't know that Sun would sell them outside of an entire system.
      - classichasclass 1y ago