I’m tempted to try and make an old spice ad parody.
Look at your tower, now look at me,
sadly, it isn’t me,
but if you stopped running closed source firmware
it could work like me
…
I’m in a supercomputer ♪♫♬
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The user manual for the Talos II mainboard was uploaded to the wiki, if anyone wants some light reading. 
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Hi all,
I am new here although I have been monitoring this thread and the development of Talos for a while now. Really keen to get my hands on one but before I do I would like to see a review from the likes of Anandtech or Phoronix.
I emailed Raptor about delivery of their first batches and they said Q1 etc etc. Has anyone here actually placed an order early last year? Anyone got their hands on one yet?
Michael
No but I know some people at a college who got one for their lab. I can let you know how it pans out for them if you want.
Basically just take a PowerMac G5 Quad, and then multiply that by 400.
Yes it would be good to know how it works out for others.
I now feel so obliged that I am going to bid a second hand quad G5 to contain my “itchiness”…
Phoronix said they would try to run benchmarks remotely:
Hopefully as the launch time nears we’ll be able to get remote access to a system for running some POWER9 Linux benchmarks.
but since the main shipment has not arrived and even Integricloud has no announcement of POWER9 yet, my guess is that it might still be awhile.
The developer of TenFourFox has purchased a Talos II and seeing the testing he did with Spectre on Power, I imagine there will be benchmarks posted there when he gets his system.
I myself haven’t, I don’t have the money for this sort of thing… yet. So I live vicariously through my additions to the RCS Wiki and this thread. Although I have something at work coming up, and I’ll probably be posting less and less.
They had mentioned a supplier problem that delayed shipments to late January or February. They did already ship a system to Vikings so that it would be there for FOSDEM 2018. I assume Vikings acts as a European reseller for them.
An additional post on Twitter mentions that this first batch is a limited size:
We received a small initial shipment of #TalosII units in advance of the main batch expected later this month. One of these was rushed to #FOSDEM2018 to provide a hands-on look at a fully functional #TalosII #POWER9 system!
And while I was writing this I found on Twitter a picture of the Talos II board at FOSDEM:
Why three companies?
If you are trying to figure out what’s going for yourself, keep in mind that there are three companies that are pretty closely related:
- Raptor Engineering - Website, GNU Social, Twitter
- Raptor Computing Systems (RCS) - Website, Wiki, Twitter
- Raptor Data Solutions / Integricloud - Website, Twitter
My guess is that these are all basically the same company with Timothy Pearson at the helm, and kept separate for liability reasons.
- Since only Raptor Engineering has a GNU Social / Fediverse account, it has sometimes posted on behalf of RCS.
- Timothy Pearson is an employee at Raptor Engineering, but he frequently posts on the Raptor Computing Wiki and is interviewed in their press kit. No one else working at any of the three has been mentioned by name as far as I can tell.
- Raptor Engineering has sold products in the past, but Talos is being sold through RCS, which has never sold anything before
Small thing to here: Someone on the forum is giving me a few PowerMac G5’s. He happens to have a quad, which if you don’t know is more powerful than an i7 3770, and we’ll be meeting in a month or two. What should I use them for? One will be a linux box, probably the quad, and the other 2 or 3 IDK yet. Lemme know ideas!
Build server, database server, mail server, router all in one Box. Maybe throw in some computer vision and or machine learning.
Thats a bit much to do on powerPC 
Benchmark them and demonstrate how it’s more powerful than an Ivybridge i7, I’m intrigued as to what benchmarks that statement is based on - something other than OSX I expect 
In native OSX a G5 quad is capable of 4K video stuff. Scrub and playback, though I’m unsure of editing personally. But based purely off of MIPS and total block processing benchmarks, they are more powerful. The Dualies at 2.7GHZ are also stupid powerful.
I’ll be benching them anyways because thats how you do hardware checks on G5’s. The sensors are touchy and sometimes don’t work well.
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Whilst your insights as to how powerful the G5’s compared to newer x86 chipsets are interesting, I’ll remain skeptical until I see the numbers
I owned a late 2005 dual core 2.3GHz, it wasn’t much better than the late 2006 macbook pro (C2D) I also owned although it was of course way faster than the older 13" G4 powerbook I’d previously had.
The late 2012 mac mini quad-core i7 I later aquired was easily the most powerful mac I’d ever used (up until that point) and was an amazing little machine. But I stopped regularly using OSX shortly after that. IMO macs were best during PPC era before the intel macs became ever more souless with each new iteration of OSX and Linux and FreeBSD matured further for the x86 desktop.
Still, I do miss my old G4 & G5 they had character - kind of in the way an old NA V8 powered car has character
I’m looking forward to hands on reports of the new TALOS stuff, I hope people who have placed orders don’t have to wait too long.
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Fair enough
Part of the problem with that is that apple used X86 on their OSX based PPC machines. This caused the proc’s to spend most of their time trying to patch everything through. When you weren’t doing major system stuff or on the net and just processing stuff, rendering video, blowing through code, batch processing in general, thats where the 970 raped. Still does, just expensive to run.
Glad to know I’m not alone
Expect stuff to come out on it in june/july. My IRC friends have been busy it seems
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What are you referring to? The system code was from Nextstep and classic mac os, right? I imagine legacy code would be in C or ported from 68k assembly.
The base OS code? No dude OSX was built off of BSD. Now they only have the kernel and userland, but 10.6.8 and back was basically just OpenBSD with Aqua and some fine tuning on top of it.
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It’s looks like its Mach/BSD kernel and a NextStep/Classic Mac OS API. From what I hear, the UNIX userland stuff is from FreeBSD.
What here is x86 based? Apple made a prerelease build of OpenStep on x86 and PPC, but after that, Mac OS X was PPC only until the switch.
Are you suggesting that Apple maintained x86 builds of OpenStep/OSX since 2000 and this made their PPC code worse?
2 × 20 core screenshot, 18 core chips for sale
Raptor engineering posted a screenshot of a benchmark running on a dual 20-core system, although they are only selling 18 core chips right now:
| Cores | 4 | 8 | 18 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $355 | $545 | $1290 |
Note that the 18-core is “expected to ship late March / April 2018”
POWER9 on Integricloud
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Any idea what the base and turbo frequencies are for each of these three CPUs? Trying to find the right balance between single and multi thread performance.
The only information on this I can find is what the Raptor Computing added on their wiki’s page for the Sforza module. They list:
Maximum base clock 3.1GHz (4- and 8-core)
Maximum WOF clock 3.8GHz (4- and 8-core)
Hasn’t been been updated for 18 or 20 core yet.
IBM has more Sforza documentation, but it is not public. Needs an “access entitlement” in IBM-speak.
Since 2003 when the G5’s were announced and released, yeah. Prior to that the G4’s were actually really good. When the G5 updates dropped that fucked everything. Later on a tool came out in 2006 that strips all the code from all your apps and system that is for other architectures, including ARM, G3, G4, G5, and X86, and on my ibook G4 my performance skyrocketed. From looking at apps on my system that were G5 oriented, but could run on a G4 just fine, that sped that shit up significantly. Even just having it scrub the base sytem of everything X86 on 10.5 sped up interface performance like mad. Other tests by other people have been done that I don’t exactly understand that have to do with how the system runs through different calls and organisation, but again thats over my head. As well as Linux running better on G4/G5 than the OS that was originally dev’d for them (10.4, I just run 10.5 for the software compatibility and deal with the performance hit from the added AltiVec usage).
See what I’m saying?
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