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No, Talos is certainly not a cheap board, but I believe it was clearly intended by its developer to proverbially break ground for a new ecosystem that wasn't vendor-controlled--with increased adoption, these would undoubtedly get cheaper and better down the line. While most people aren't rich, there is certainly enough wealth among the HN readership, as evidenced by their interest in Apple products, high-end smartphones, DSLRs, Teslas, etc. And even if people couldn't afford to get a workstation, they could have still donated to the cause. That this didn't happen says to me that enough people honestly just didn't give a damn. This comes off as very strange to me, because people are clearly outraged by the conduct of MS, Intel, and others. Buying a Talos means a chance to start stripping some of the usual antagonists in this saga of their hegemony on the computing community at large. Personally, I'd be willing to live with more expensive computers in the short-term if it meant a check on their influence in the long-term. And performance-wise, Talos with an unclocked 8 core 190 watt POWER8 promised a bit better than the i7-5960X workstation I use at home (not a $400 chip), and consumed only modestly more power than same. So that doesn't strike me as a strong argument against it. But if the only reason this product would appeal to people is that it needed to offer equivalent performance to its x86 counterparts at roughly equiv prices, then we're in dire straits--that misses the entire point of having a computer that guarantees your access right down to the hardware and firmware. Until now, we've only enjoyed this luxury on small embedded boards (e.g., BeagleBone), which are toys in comparison. Finally, RISC-V may be promising, but it's not here--POWER8 is, and POWER9 is already in the works. Why hold your breath for what may prove to be vaporware apart from prototypes in an academic or company R&D setting? |