I’ve been happy with my System76 laptop and it looks like they are going to release some really awesome, high-performance systems that are built in-house. I hope their investment pays off.
Thelio desktop computers will be available in 3 sizes to suit your needs:
*Thelio (Up to 32GB RAM, 24TB Storage)
*Thelio Major (Up to 128GB RAM, 46TB Storage)
*Thelio Massive (Up to 768GB ECC RAM, 86TB Storage)
System76 on US Manufacturing and Open Hardware
Just pre-ordered my Thelio!
Ryzen 5 2400G, 16GB RAM, VEGA 11 iGPU, and 500GB NVMe SSD. Can’t wait for December! $1500 well spent!
( Yes I know I could build a better system for cheaper but I’m putting my money where my mouth is.)
I am seriously tempted by Thelio… if only a desktop was an option, I’d splurge on it. The Open Hardware aspect of it is extremely welcome, especially as a change in the hardware world!
Congratulations!
Well said!
Best part of it is it’s mainstream parts. A couple months after it arrives I can just drop in a R7 2700X and a graphics card and be golden!
I really wish there were more stricter definitions people stuck to.
If I’m reading it right the only part of the system that’s open hardware is the case and an IO backplane, but otherwise proprietary main board and everything else.
They kind of hint at that a bit in the blog article but its not 100% clear.
Credit where it is due though, very nice looking computer and nice to see that its and libre design. I always thought GPL wasn’t the most suitable license though, maybe this has changed with v3? Any reason its used over licences targeted for hardware design?
The important thing is that it’s progress. This time last year, we didn’t have an open case or IO backplane from System76 and now we do.
I’m sure it takes a lot more to build an open motherboard, and I’m sure they’ll get there eventually. If you look, they have at least four different chipsets they’re supporting on this initial launch. To design, from scratch, a mainboard around four different chipsets probably takes resources they don’t have at the moment.
I’m extremely happy with the progress and look forward to seeing more from them soon!
If you look at the asking price for low-volume (relative to Dell-size OEMs) stuff like Talos II / Blackbird, you can see why they really can’t pull off custom mainboards for this sort of thing. And to your point, Raptor doesn’t even have to deal with chipsets, they are only mass producing one board at the moment.
I think even Purism buys their boards from an ODM and then have to manually remove the AMI firmware themselves.
I would guess that IO backplanes for SAS and SATA signalling are probably less demanding than the DRAM or PCIe lines on a mainboard, right? Or is that not really an issue?
My hope is that someone picks up the IO plate and integrates it into a SBC. Because i would really like some low power ARM boards with lots of storage IO.
I hope that Level1Techs can obtain a review unit and tell us about the case and IO plate in detail.
My hope is that someone picks up the IO plate and integrates it into a SBC. Because i would really like some low power ARM boards with lots of storage IO.
The problem isn’t typically the connectors, it’s bandwidth. There are Pi hats for SATA and M2, and some non-Pi boards offer some decent storage connectors See: Helios4
Most of those boards choke pretty hard trying to handle USB3, let alone a HDD RAID10 or SATAIII SSD.