The Talos Secure Workstation
Completely open source no the core. You can rework the EFI if you wanted to, everything.
This thing is insane.
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Interesting, beyond expensive but interesting.
is mobo takes off and ibm sells their power chips it may lead ibm back to consumer market.
(though power9 is out or is about to be)
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The motherboard is 4 grand. It will not take off(hell it will not make the funding goals). Also look at the shipping costs for worldwide, it is nuts.
If the motherboard and processor could be had for 1500 to 2 grand they might have something that could work. I don't see this going anywhere.
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hm, i wouldn't say normal people would buy such but thats how power system costs. I'd be interested as proper new dual xeon mobo can cost up to $2-3k if you look for ones that have 24 memory slots and support around 2-4TB of memory.
those power8 cpu's are far better.
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I don't think it's going to make it, but I sure hope it does. Power architecture looks promising, but has fallen too far behind and now Intel and AMD have x86 and it's adopters abuse it's proprietary nature. ARM is great for being open source, but ARM is usually really under-powered, only recently do we have ARM tablets outperforming my Surface Pro 2, which is 3 years old, and we had an NVidia K1 that was close, try comparing that to a $400 Desktop PC custom built.
That said, I wish I could get a custom SoC like the AMD Merlin Falcon, but they only sell that stuff to businesses apparently. A shame, I had an idea for a tablet PC with at least some performance. Maybe Power can help with this eventually if it does come back.
This string intrigues me. You all do know that as recent as 1998 machines were still in the thousands? If not 1000 dollars for a solid as hell machine? At that in only 1995 we had PPC, M68k, X86, SPARC, and MIPS computers all over the place and only recently has PPC fallen out to be used correctly for a while. The reason we have machines as cheap as we do nowadays is that companies like Packard Bell sold 8086's as cheap as they could when the 386DX4's were about to get replaced by the 486! I laugh my ass off when I see people bitch about the new i7's and Xeons being stupid expensive. Honestly hardware would be more expensive if sales didn't inflate at an absolutely ludicrous rate every year. Strangely enough, if you want to believe me or not, the average computer should still be sold at the same price as a macbook (1200-1800) as the companies could improve more and add more technologies to their laptops. However parts are cheaper if you buy more of them. There are reasons we have $200 USD APU laptops that are new at best buy and thats because they pump that shit out like crazy.
Edit: At that, I also have to think that nvidia, for as overpriced as they seem, are completely correct in their pricing and the difference in quality between NV and AMD is comparative in price (in gaming a 390X is just as fine as a titan. Having a dinky number say 1200 FPS on a titan just as a 390X is 450. Thats synthetic to your brain TBH. 250FPS is as solid as it can get to the human mind and is the basic limit. 60Hz, 75, 120, 140, 250... Dosen't matter really.
$7500 USD is what I would expect to pay for this sort of thing. Intel has had the hardest time since the IBM 7445A2 server chips came out in 2003 even keeping their xeon line close to the raw MIPS processing ratings. Hell the dual 970Fx machines from apple were ahead until the 3770K came along... What? 12 years later? This is by the MIPS rating system. POWER8 is another 16-24 years ahead anything intel has because little endian is bullshit compared to a big endian architecture, let alone bi-endian like PPC that can yick up little and big endian both at the same time and run away with X86 processes. And before anyone mentions apple's shitty ppc machines, they weren't shit, the code running on them was all X86 and at such a rate that it would bog down the system. My G4 ibook is about as powerful in processing power as my C2D gaming laptop processor wise.
In any event this sort of thing is in fact a niche market. Its for insane people like me that want to develop interesting shit on the most flexible platform in the world to develop on. If I can get a PPC G5 system into my house that has a 970GM or GD set of chips, I'm golden. I don't need any of my X86 shit anymore I don't even need games. I'm going to be too busy building my dream linux system to be playing games TBH.
Yes the price is high, but theres more than one of me who want this, and I REALLY REALLY REALLY WANT THIS.
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Quad new intel xeon's are beating dual ibm
(basically 4 xeon's are required to beat dual ibm power8 -- not even best at that)
Power8 cpu's are going up to 5GHz clocks, and 12 cores, with power based threading system. It intelligently activates and deactivates threads to a core when they are not used - thus improving performance.
single core performance (power8 can have up to 8 threads per core)
Interesting I'll need that site for my future researchings. However, I don't think PPC really has many single core single thread applications. Its a multithreaded architecture, thats why theres 64 threads on a 8 core chip.
ibm power8 are using SMT8 (which gives you up to 8 threads per core) within your cpu-scheduler timer you can specify for power server to self manage the threads - it will decrease the number of threads if they are not used or expand up to 8 threads per core if they are required.
Its quite useful if a software doesn't perform well with 8 threads per core, or with 64 threads per cpu. Sometimes applications are not compiled to use whole thing so, its assigned to timer to use all cores as 1 thread, while other processes can use whole array of cores and threads at the same time. Its a marvel of technology and programming.
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