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Talos II

raptorcs.com

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Re: Talos II

#21

Post by CrystalGamma »

I applaud them for pricing the board at around $2000 (though with the CPUs it's obviously more expensive). This sits squarely within my budget for a high-performance and trustworthy workstation like this (even accounting for taxes). However I would also have payed for faster CPUs (up to ~$1000 each for an 8- or 12-core processor).

Does anyone know if all POWER9 processors fit into that socket, and if yes, if there is anyone selling POWER9 in retail quantities (preferably in Europe).

Another question that isn't answered on their page is the payment options. Like many fellow Europeans I don't have a credit card, so if that is the only way to pay, I'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to buy this.

I wonder how much power this system will consume on idle? I read IBM significantly improved the power management with POWER9, so here's hoping 8 cores of this won't take significantly more than the 110W idle of my 8-core Piledriver system.

Re: Talos II

#22

Post by e12e »

It seems they're not all that interested in marketing to end users, despite the talos ii "bare-bones" kit available for pre-order on the site - I couldn't find any reviews of the previous talos I/power8 system online - i would assume they'd at the very least get someone like anadtech, ars or one of the many Linux journals to do some hands-on testing / free marketing?

I mean, if I had too much cash, I'd be tempted to get one, but I'd probably be even.more likely if I could see some blender rendering benchmarks and Linux kernel compile timings etc...

Re: Talos II

#24

Post by Cieplak »

Will it support FreeBSD? Of course it would run it, but I don't have time anymore to write my own device drivers.

Re: Talos II

#25

Post by pedrocr »

>Like many fellow Europeans I don't have a credit card, so if that is the only way to pay, I'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to buy this.

I find this surprising. At least in Portugal it's now common to buy stuff online with a credit card, either with an actual card or with one of those simple services the bank provides where they generate a virtual card on demand for you to use for a single purchase.

Re: Talos II

#26

Post by pedrocr »

arca_vorago wrote: post #10

I have been keeping an eye on Raptor and Talos for a while now, and it's super exciting to see another cpu-platform with security and openess in mind. As a GNU+Linux guy, has anyone had any experience with GNU+Linux on the Power platform? What kind of differences could I expect. I've been itching to build a new AMD Naples 64 core (2x cpu) server, but I have to admit I'm tempted to just do AMD Ryzen for my upcoming de…

I was curious as well and it seems the latest Ubuntu LTS has POWER8+ as a supported architecture[1]. Debian should also run just fine I imagine. Hopefully someone else has actual experience on how it runs.

[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/installation-guide/ppc64el/ch02s...

Re: Talos II

#27

Post by dEnigma »

pedrocr wrote: post #25

>Like many fellow Europeans I don't have a credit card, so if that is the only way to pay, I'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to buy this. I find this surprising. At least in Portugal it's now common to buy stuff online with a credit card, either with an actual card or with one of those simple services the bank provides where they generate a virtual card on demand for you to use for a single purchase.

Anecdotal of course, but here in Austria I know a lot of people without credit cards (myself included). The people who own credit cards are mostly frequent travellers, since it's easier to buy plane tickets if you have one (I was lucky enough to always have had at least one person with a credit among my travel partners, so I could just pay them by bank transfer or in cash later). AFAIK no one in my close family circle has a credit card.

edit: According to the Austrian National Bank the number of issued credit cards in Austria was 2,85 mio. in 2012, compared to 8,5 mio. debit cards (population: 8.747 million (2016)), and the amount of credit cards was growing rapidly. Seems like there are more people with credit cards than I thought.

https://www.oenb.at/en/Payment-Processing/Card-Payments/Card...

edit2: Statistics Austria has the percentage of households with credit cards at 53% in 2014

http://www.statistik.at/web_de/statistiken/menschen_und_gese... (German, it's the bottom row)

Re: Talos II

#28

Post by 4ad »

dEnigma wrote: post #27
pedrocr wrote: post #25

>Like many fellow Europeans I don't have a credit card, so if that is the only way to pay, I'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to buy this. I find this surprising. At least in Portugal it's now common to buy stuff online with a credit card, either with an actual card or with one of those simple services the bank provides where they generate a virtual card on demand for you to use for a single purchase.

Anecdotal of course, but here in Austria I know a lot of people without credit cards (myself included). The people who own credit cards are mostly frequent travellers, since it's easier to buy plane tickets if you have one (I was lucky enough to always have had at least one person with a credit among my travel partners, so I could just pay them by bank transfer or in cash later). AFAIK no one in my close family circl…

I also live in Austria. People look at me very weird when I try to pay with Visa/Mastercard credit cards at retail shops rather than using the worthless Maestro debit cards. I don't have any friends who have credit cards.

The real problem here has nothing to do with credit cards though, but with the unavailability of Visa/Mastercards debit cards in many European countries. For example, in my home country, Romania, very few people have credit cards, possibly even less than in Austria (edit: after your edit, definitely less), but everybody has a Visa/Mastecard debit card. No such thing in Austria. I heard that even in Germany it's hard to get a Visa/Mastercard debit card.

People don't want credit cards for various reasons, that's fine, although personally I don't agree with their reasoning, but Visa/Mastercard should still be available as a platform rather than being restricted to credit cards.

Re: Talos II

#29

Post by cat199 »

arca_vorago wrote: post #10

I have been keeping an eye on Raptor and Talos for a while now, and it's super exciting to see another cpu-platform with security and openess in mind. As a GNU+Linux guy, has anyone had any experience with GNU+Linux on the Power platform? What kind of differences could I expect. I've been itching to build a new AMD Naples 64 core (2x cpu) server, but I have to admit I'm tempted to just do AMD Ryzen for my upcoming de…

No idea recently, but even back in the apple PPC days pretty much everything worked.

The things that didn't were typically lesser used desktoppy things or more community written software that didn't take endianness into consideration. If you're not afraid to dig into sources alot of things only took adding an endianness hack / byteswap to certain lines to make things work properly.

Also to check into are some languages/compilers/interpreters simply might not have a backend for your CPU. If you use any of these critically you might double check; common things like perl/python/java/ruby should be fine.

I'd expect most server-side / computation oriented things should be fine- desktop, etc, not so sure especially since noone is making any power based workstations these days, though remote GUI mgmt is still useful in some annoying cases

Overall stability, barring per-platform issues should be fine as well.

basically, if you don't mind getting your hands a bit dirty from time to time, it should be okay; not sure of support for this particular board / firmware/ etc though..

hopefully someone with recent experience can confirm

Re: Talos II

#30

Post by haneefmubarak »

CrystalGamma wrote: post #21

I applaud them for pricing the board at around $2000 (though with the CPUs it's obviously more expensive). This sits squarely within my budget for a high-performance and trustworthy workstation like this (even accounting for taxes). However I would also have payed for faster CPUs (up to ~$1000 each for an 8- or 12-core processor). Does anyone know if all POWER9 processors fit into that socket, and if yes, if there is…

I'm stateside, but I've had lots of success paying for things online and at places in person that want a credit card by just giving my debit card (and not saying anything, ofc).

That being said, YMMV.

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