[grey4228]

Offtopic: Most might be thinking fully FLOSS is something that's only happened in software, or powerless hardware. But the thing is server and desktop grade powerful and fully FLOSS hardware with PCIe 4.0 and DDR4 ECC memory are available right now to customers and businesses. Not as powerful as AMD. AMD will never be open though. It's not x86. POWER9. FSF RYF certified.

https://www.raptorcs.com/

#talos-workstation on freenode IRC to chat with users.

[MaxBarraclough]

I like the idea of FSF-certified hardware, but aren't POWER9 machines ten times the price of the average desktop?

[greggyb]

Doing a quick spec out of a Talos II that is similar[0] to my Threadripper 3970x workstation puts the price at ~2x.

[aidenn0]

And a typical TR workstation is 2x the price of an "average desktop" so maybe a 4x multiplier?

[greggyb]

You could price out a desktop for your own comparison. I don't think it's fair to compare something explicitly designed to be a workstation to a desktop-class machine.

[aidenn0]

It's both fair and not; if you want a desktop, the cheapest POWER desktop is 3k, and at 4 cores it's arguably not competing against TR. Yes it's IO throughput will put a desktop class part to shame, but you can't go any cheaper.

[greggyb]

Agreed. There isn't really a viable desktop-class offering from Raptor. This is a shame.

For those who have need for the workstation-ish features Raptor offers in its Talos line, the premium isn't too great over a roughly equivalent x86 workstation-class machine.

[smcl]

Maybe not 10x but they’re certainly more than a similarly spec’d dev workstation. I guess the idea is that developers are the target market and they have a bit more disposable income on average and are more likely to want to pay extra for something like this.

[grey4228]

What 'smcl' commented, also all prices are in this link, scroll down:

https://www.raptorcs.com/

[MaxBarraclough]

Thanks. Looks like their cheapest system goes for $3,404.59. It has VGA output, but no DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort.

[dragontamer]

Strange: the price on their systems seems to have gone up since the last time I saw them.

I wonder if shipping issues have caused their prices to skyrocket recently?

[timw4mail]

As much as I enjoy the idea, I can not justify the price, especially considering the huge breadth of software NOT available.

While it would work for my purposes as a server or a dev workstation, you still have to deal with a fairly niche processor architecture.

Ironically, though, the development of software for more modern POWER systems has kept some of the Apple PowerPC systems more up to date (assuming they are running linux, like Void).

[ksec]

Any news or update on POWER10?

[floatboth]

POWER10 switched to a serial memory interface (OMI), IIUC Raptor won't touch any of this stuff until there are FOSS memory modules, which there aren't currently.