The TALOS II from Raptor Systems is Interesting

Hardware Enterprise Gear
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22

The case, if you didn’t recognize it, is a Supermicro 4U/tower case, same or similar to this one. I’ve worked with one of these before and although it might not have a “premium” appearance or feel, I don’t have any particular complaints about the build quality. Overall for a white box server/workstation chassis it’s a pretty solid choice.

It wouldn’t make much sense at this stage for Raptor to be investing resources into a custom case design, especially after they failed to secure crowdfunding for their previous attempt at a POWER8 system.

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That is good to hear; also, now I can see read/see about the case, thank you!

Edit: looks most like SC747.

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I find it interesting the design decision to go with a Power PC derived platform over developing the same compute as an add in card. After all you need application support for a non-86 architecture anyway and the PCIe bus is faster than basically any networking solution, so placing their POWER cores onto a card that could be used in much the same way as compute\commercial graphics cards already are would seem a more widely deploy-able setup than dedicated boxes, so I’d love to hear why they chose to go the other way.

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The point is to be able to go from power on to OS without needing to use any proprietary code at all.

OCC code (on chip controller - always running)
CPU code
  SBE -> hostboot -> skiboot -> petitboot ->  OS

all of that is open source, and if you use OpenBMC, then you can remotely power on and off and still never need to trust a black box.

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Good point, my head was in a increased efficiency for some task vs 86x mindset not a open standards mindset.

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The company behind it has a one of their primary goals of producing an open system so it makes sense in that context.

I’m surprised there isnt more talk about this here considering the number of people that are always complaining about big companies doing bad things with closed propitiatory systems.

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Also, you would be needing to slot RAM into a PCIe device, or else have RAM soldered to it like a GPU. Not to mention, you would also need a host system CPU (which would increase cost) and have to deal with carting data between card-RAM and system-RAM.

In short, you would be cajoling a CPU to work like a GPU, and that seems like a lot more development than just making an EATX mainboard. It might be a cool idea, but I don’t see what purpose it would serve.

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Other than a very select few no one know what this thing is. With that comes the “what to do we do with such a thing” problem. To most people it is as if you dropped a UFO’s navigation computer on there desk and said “make that run minesweeper”.

I am one of these people. It certainly looks interesting but it is very expensive, not aimed at average users, and seemingly has absolutely no community to fall back on (though I have no idea) unlike all current systems.

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Because that would make too much sense. A POWER coprocessor card ala a Xeon Phi, or Tesla would be a lot cheaper to produce, and would be a better way to introduce new buyers to the technology.

The desire to totally unseat x86 as a platform is clouding their vision. It’s absurd.

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Nice troll.

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Most apps you would want in linux are on ppc and POWER for desktop use, however this isn’t meant for desktop use. Though I’m sure it would be a mad document handler in 25 years :3

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LOL come on. This TALOS thing is never going to come to fruition. It’s just vaporware. You’re getting trolled, but not by me.

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Well the first one def isn’t, but I’m confident this one is. If it dies I’ll stick with my macs o.o

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While I share @FaunCB optimisim @NetBandit is also correct in his own right aremis. Its difficult to produce an open system that becomes fully mainstream because of the nature of how our actually world economy works proprietary simply makes more money in the end vs an open system. Not saying you cant get rich and be successful with an opensystem but its just a different model most companies have a hard time making successful

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I mean I’m not denying that, OEM laptops exist under that principle, I’m saying that if this comes out I’ll be the first to go in debt. If it doesn’t, then I’ll stick with PPC macs (which apple released to the open front and theres now EFI images for) and just enjoy what I have already.

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Different for the sake of different is fine, but that doesn’t sell systems.

OpenPOWER is going to have to provide significantly better performance and capabilities at a lower price just to get people to even consider spending money on it. And frankly that’s going to be nigh impossible. And when you factor in the inconvenience of having to use different software, learning, maintenance, and peripheral hardware, the deal gets progressively worse.

x86 is the most open system. As much as I’d like to see Intel dethroned, I don’t see it happening until all sorts of factors change to favor a competitor. Intel wasted more money on the iTanic boondoggle than what AMD is worth. Intel couldn’t even dethrone their own technology.

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Well, for the most part, the open systems are the old ones. You know, the HP/Compaq NW8000’s of the world where hacking the BIOS and replacing it with Openboot isn’t even illegal anymore because the OEM’s don’t give a shit. Its all very… Smooth. However you have to be willing to learn how the old systems work. Quite often its something like a core duo macbook 1,1 but everyone just ree’s and you get the lounge having a hissy fit about you not buying ryzen to do email.

The problem is less about adoption. Amiga’s are still around and getting new users and a good amiga setup nowadays is 4000 bucks. It’ll have fans, that isn’t a problem. Hell I know the university I went to will buy at least one and replace a lot of servers with it that just take up space.

39

Well Intel and AMD… Ultimately they are binary twins one cant exist without the other not only due to the sherman anti trust act but because they do provide half the instrunction set of each others processors to each other. AMD providing the 64bit extensions and intel providing the IA-32 bit instructions from way back on the 386 (yes they have improved and changed since then but this is essentially what makes up x86-64)

but yeah as much as id like to see them dethroned… their system works… it would take a very long time to switch over and the benefits would need to be significant

40

You know I’ve had an interesting thought brewing for a while… We have all these Intel chips that are holy shit balls amazing but they still run windows like trash… Why?

You know what? Blog thread. Intel is getting dethroned by AMD right now, but I have other questions on top of all of it.

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I finished time marking a POWER9 chip webinar from January if anyone is interested, it has a fair amount of detailed information:

The YouTube video appears to be down at the moment, apparently unintentionally, but the slides and video can be downloaded at the AIX Virtual User Group’s webpage, the slides can be found under the heading “January 26, 2017 - POWER9 - Jeff Stuecheli”, while the video files are listed by a bare index page at public.dhe.ibm.com.

Time markers

0:00 intro/VUG announcements - Jill Armstrong
2:59 presentation start - Jeff Stuecheli (chip development)
3:54 POWER roadmap
7:22 POWER9 markets
11:15 core design - SMT8 vs SMT4
14:20 core execution slice microarchitecture
17:43 pipeline improvements
19:30 core diagram slide - SMT4 core
21:00 memory attachment - SO vs SU
25:08 common features
32:12 SO/SU SMT4/SMT8 matrix
34:15 performance vs POWER8
35:53 POWER ISA 3 instructions
38:42 POWER 9 logical view - interconnects/throughput
39:57 25 Gb/s signaling for SMP, Open CAPI, NVLink 2
41:10 16 socket topology - probably called 980
42:23 interrupt design
44:18 accelerators
47:09 accelerator connection types
49:38 progression - PCIe3 → PCIe4 → NVLink → Open CAPI
50:42 POWER9 ecosystem
51:30 Open CAPI
55:01 members
56:12 Open CAPI 3 features
57:24 virtual addressing
57:55 attached memory et al.
59:21 end of slides
1:00:01 Q&A start
1:00:39 Q: performance vs POWER8 - graph same for SMT4 compared as for SMT8 compared?
1:02:34 Q: can different chip types be mixed
1:03:26 Q: chip speeds
1:04:33 Q: ISA affecting AIX version compatibility
1:05:51 Q: live partition mobility
1:06:36 Q: number of 25 Gb/s links
1:08:10 Q: SMT4 vs SMT8, Linux vs AIX
1:10:29 Q: POWER9 vs x86
1:12:39 Q: DW on chart - looking for slide
1:14:04 – relevant slide for above found
1:14:36 Q: are charts/slides confidential
1:15:17 announce NDA session in Orlando
1:16:45 Q: Java improvements
1:17:43 Q: Open CAPI attached memory uses
1:19:20 Q: PCIe4 adapters/uses
1:21:34 Q: accelerator effect on rPerf
1:23:17 Q: will it run Windows
1:23:36 Q: SAP HANA offerings, upgrade path
1:24:03 Q: dynamic SMT
1:24:56 threading changes from POWER8
1:25:45 end remarks

Interesting Notes

Intended Use of Chips (slide 10)

SMT4 SMT8
SO OpenPOWER dual-socket PowerVM
SU multi-socket PowerVM

The SMT4 column is labelled “Linux ecosystem”, which is what OpenPOWER is about; saying Linux is actually a bit confusing since you can run Linux under PowerVM.

I wonder why PowerVM benefits from SMT8 where Linux does not?

25 Gb/s optical connexion (slide 14)

in addition to PCIe4 (which carries CAPI 2) there is also optical 25 Gb/s connection used by Open CAPI, NVLink 2, and SMP interconnect; cool.