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Talos II Lite

secure.raptorcs.com

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Re: Talos II Lite

#11

Post by ajdlinux »

exikyut wrote: post #6

This got me sufficiently interested I started poking around and looking at pricing ("Add to cart") of all the different systems available. There are actually a few. In decreasing order of price: - Both the 2U and 4U rackmount servers are $5,475 (4U: https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2SV2/purchase.html , 2U: https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2SV1/purchase.html ). The only difference is 2 versus 3 SAS HBAs, 16…

> If "cannot" is truly literal (and it seems so - I can't see Raptor Engineering ever using a "buy an unlock code to enable socket 2" approach)

My understanding is that the Lite board is essentially the full board, but with the second socket and related components removed from the design to reduce cost.

> I'm not aware of anywhere else you can get a POWER9 box

Raptor is the only company selling Power in a workstation form factor, and of course they've got the lowest entry price.

IBM has the AC922 (https://www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/power-systems-ac922) and will be rolling out more models imminently.

Several OpenPOWER members (https://openpowerfoundation.org/) are also working on their own POWER9 machines. AFAIK, none of them have GAed just yet, but some of the machines were announced at the OpenPOWER summit - https://openpowerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/H.... There are quite a number of POWER8 machines already on the market.

All POWER9 machines use a primarily open source firmware stack, though it does depend on the vendor - vendors will have their own customisations in some cases, and in particular for the BMC firmware. Raptor is also stripping out/manually rebuilding some binary blobs etc.

(Disclosure: IBMer, I don't speak for IBM or Raptor.)

Re: Talos II Lite

#12

Post by daxorid »

Koshkin wrote: post #5

Open source firmware - nice! POWER9, supported by Linux - great! Not sure what the actual target customer base is, but the geek in me says I want it.

> Not sure what the actual target customer base is

The target customer is someone who doesn't want to be spied on by IME, PSP, or TrustZone, but totally trusts IBM not to collude with FVEY :)

Re: Talos II Lite

#13

Post by bradfa »

Hopefully they will start selling just this motherboard, without the case and power supply. I assume the "Lite" version of the board is just the normal Talos II board but with parts to support the second CPU socket depopulated in order to reduce cost.

Many original complaints about the Talos system were its high price, it seems that Raptor really did listen as this new "Lite" offering is getting down into the "I could probably convince my manager to buy me one of these at work" kinds of pricing, assuming I had a genuine reason to be interested in it.

Re: Talos II Lite

#14

Post by lawrenceong »

newbie to Power 9 here. i'm just wondering what one can do with this type of machine better than an intel. i presently have the dell precision with up to 2 procs (currently have 1), am planning to gain more insight into machine learning.

TIA

Re: Talos II Lite

#15

Post by juliangoldsmith »

lawrenceong wrote: post #14

newbie to Power 9 here. i'm just wondering what one can do with this type of machine better than an intel. i presently have the dell precision with up to 2 procs (currently have 1), am planning to gain more insight into machine learning. TIA

I think the biggest advantage of this particular system is openness. As the linked page says, you can modify any piece of code in the system, including CPU microcode. That means no secret operating system running somewhere you can't touch (i.e. Intel Management Engine), and no opaque blobs that could be doing anything.

Re: Talos II Lite

#16

Post by mindcrime »

Nice to see us getting closer to the long awaited day when you can "order up an ATX form factor POWER motherboard, throw it in a case, add some RAM and boot it up". BUT... man, the price. Wowzers... This is still a bit steep for a hobbyist or anybody operating outside a corporate setting.

Still, it's progress, so I'm not going to complain too much. And hopefully one day this catches on and as volumes scale up, the prices will start to drop.

Re: Talos II Lite

#18

Post by dis-sys »

Interesting! they are offering 22-cores Power9 chip for $2.5k each, that is significantly cheaper than a 22 cores Xeon (2696v4).

can't wait to see some benchmark results showing what you can get from a dual 22-cores Power9. too bad that Phoronix only has the results for the dual 8-cores setup.

Re: Talos II Lite

#19

Post by _b8r0 »

ajdlinux wrote: post #11
exikyut wrote: post #6

This got me sufficiently interested I started poking around and looking at pricing ("Add to cart") of all the different systems available. There are actually a few. In decreasing order of price: - Both the 2U and 4U rackmount servers are $5,475 (4U: https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2SV2/purchase.html , 2U: https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2SV1/purchase.html ). The only difference is 2 versus 3 SAS HBAs, 16…

> If "cannot" is truly literal (and it seems so - I can't see Raptor Engineering ever using a "buy an unlock code to enable socket 2" approach) My understanding is that the Lite board is essentially the full board, but with the second socket and related components removed from the design to reduce cost. > I'm not aware of anywhere else you can get a POWER9 box Raptor is the only company selling Power in a workstation…

> Raptor is the only company selling Power in a workstation form factor, and of course they've got the lowest entry price.

Not sure if the AmigaOne X5000 board counts, but it might be worth looking here: http://amigakit.amiga.store/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=3... - the motherboard is also available alone.

Re: Talos II Lite

#20

Post by ajdlinux »

bradfa wrote: post #13

Hopefully they will start selling just this motherboard, without the case and power supply. I assume the "Lite" version of the board is just the normal Talos II board but with parts to support the second CPU socket depopulated in order to reduce cost. Many original complaints about the Talos system were its high price, it seems that Raptor really did listen as this new "Lite" offering is getting down into the "I coul…

Raptor has indicated that they will sell the mainboard only, just not quite yet: https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/997421199117430784?...

(Disclosure: IBMer, I don't speak for IBM or Raptor)

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