POWER9 MicroATX board

They said it was going to be announced in October and I've been checking their twitter ever since. Here's the picture of it from the OpenPowerOrg summit that started today
twitter.com/RaptorCompSys

If you've been thinking of leaving the x86 architecture without spending thousands of dollars just on the motherboard this is it, whether it's because of libre computing or security issues we finally have a viable alternative to the current standard in desktop computing. It's a bit blurry but that white socket between the ram stick and PSU looks like it might be an M.2 slot. As there's a lot empty space next to it there might even be two of them. Hopefully the SATA ports in the corner will be optional for those that don't want any proprietary code in their computer.

The tweet before this one mentions a fully libre mini super computer someone built using standard dual socket Talos computers that's very impressive with eight 18-core CPUs for a total of 144 cores/576 threads.
wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/User:JSharp

There isn't much on the internet about this platform asides for their wiki but a few months ago the guy who runs the TenFourFox browser has started a new site dedicated to POWER/PPC users, there isn't much content on it now.
talospace.com/

There hasn't been any new updates recently on the PowerPC notebook project although an update is expected by the end of this month for the electrical schematics.
powerpc-notebook.org/en/

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Other urls found in this thread:

elinar.com/artificial-intelligence/gdpr-solution-ai/
wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Talos_II/Hardware_Compatibility_List#AMD
openpowerfoundation.org/summit-2018-10-eu/
redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/GraphicsResearch#ARM-Mali-and-Lima
gitlab.freedesktop.org/lima/web/wikis/home
livescience.com/18072-rise-titans-exascale-supercomputers-leap-power-hurdle.html
cacm.acm.org/news/192296-supercomputings-super-energy-needs-and-what-to-do-about-them/fulltext
wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Blackbird
youtube.com/watch?v=zYL42WQfgGI
youtube.com/watch?v=oa9xbnIdrFw
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

I only hope the radiator can accomodates standard fans, this time.

Do we have open source consumer-tier PSU units yet? Not counting Facebook's consortium for cheap and well integrated server hardware, I haven't heard any news on power supplies last time I checked.
It's important because Israelis use Jewish Desert Lightning Magick to infiltrate operating systems, when TEMPEST practices are not followed.
Also, FOSH mice. Plebbitors have been all over FOSH keyboards because of
but it would be a neat thing to find FOSH mice.

Now this is epic.

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I've never dealt with M.2 form factor SSDs so I'm not familiar with them. Let's say that this new board has 2 of those slots, since it's linked directly to the PCIe lanes I'm assuming it doesn't require a storage controller to use them?

ok user how tf can you post that without sauce this is torture

If Talos did a new custom board just for a single socket system they must be doing quite well.
Or are we looking at something different here? On board cpu maybe? Sub 1000 dollar?

nvm, I'm retarded. It's a Micro Atx board.
Product name is blackbird.

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Well I was wrong about the M.2 slots. It's an OCuLink port with a lot of room around it, maybe they have a plug-in board planned to add a few M.2 slots in there.

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tfw might actually get one now, this is sexy.

how much is it going to cost?

I'm wrong again it's their weird 'Flexver connector' but at least there's an OCuLink port near the cell battery. Not sure what the Flexver is useful for as their own wiki doesn't have much information on it.

And here's the brochure from the OpenPowerOrg summit listing all the available products that are currently using POWER. Nothing too exciting in there, the blackbird board isn't listed. There is an interesting motherboard built by Google with 80x Gen4 PCIe Lanes.

gnoo

>elinar.com/artificial-intelligence/gdpr-solution-ai/
BOTNET

How would you be certifying a system to TEMPEST specs anyway without access to classified documents and an EM test chamber? Simply adding a GPU or swapping a motherboard in an existing SDIP-27 Level A system is enough to compromize its shielding. A DIY solution might be OK if it's completely air-tight though, otherwise you need to know exactly what wavelength any emanations might be so you can get your ventilation mesh the right size.

They're open to forks and are working on replacing the existing chain of boot-loaders with Coreboot.

What is the best GFX card to pair with POWER9 CPUs if someone is wanting to build a system for day to day desktop use and encoding video?

Vega 64 if you want FOSS drivers.

Are their any suitable cards if the only demands are:

Are they ever going to come down in price? Why are these cards still so expensive now that it isn't possible to mine bitcoin with them? Are the jews really still taking advantage of all the faggots that think they'll become rich by buying $800 GPUs?

I'm pretty sure the psu is the only part of a modern computer you can actually build.

I do know that some of them online (pretty sure cryptome), as I needed access to them for what I was doing in Iraq. So ofc I had to find a leaked document or 2 in order to actually do my job properly. That's Army logistics for you.

Right now getting GPUs to work requires a lot a of tinkering.
wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Talos_II/Hardware_Compatibility_List#AMD
For cheap and passively cooled the R5 230 is suitable.


The type of memory it uses is still in very high demand so they won't come down to a reasonable price until at least 2020. The price has nothing to do with crypto currency, DDR4 is also still very high and is will stay that way for awhile.

So where's the specs?

Until someone comes up with a way to fund some boards to donate to Open/NetBSD you will be forever CoCked with just linux.

MicroATX is pretty much an absolute waste of time compared to standard

If it's not MiniITX you might as well just go standard because there's just no point to it

I just checked twitter and the conference has been over for awhile with no new information on it.

They did post a few of the slide shows from some of the presentations but no videos yet.
openpowerfoundation.org/summit-2018-10-eu/


It's the cheapest form factor they could put a socket on, price was the biggest issue they had getting people interested in POWER.

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The on-board AST2500 on the Talos II pretty much fits that, but I'm not sure if
a) this new board has it
b) if you can get them as PCIe cards

maybe i'm getting confused here but we're talking about the size of the motherboard ?

MicroATX is basically just annoying, there aren't many cases you can put them in. I just don't see the point when you can just release a standard sized motherboard, with some more expansion options. If you don't take the step of going to mini-itx you might as well stay standard is all i'm saying but if they seriously save money somehow by sticking with microATX, I mean, ok I guess ? But how much would they be saving ? $20 a board they markup by how much ?

I don't buy these RAM pricing shenanigans for a second. There's price fixing going on.

Of course, China is suing RAM manufacturers for price fixing.

Just use a PCIe extender from the PCIe 8x slot and plug it into a PCIe 16x to M.2 card, I got one for a dozen doubloons. It might come with chinese botnet though.

For the quantities they are looking at they are probably saving at least $100 per PCB compared to a full sized ATX mobo.

Why is there so much PowerPC shilling on here? How much does IBM pay you? Why aren't we waiting for RISC-V CPUs?

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Oh look, another RISC-V nigger spouting off about shit he doesn't understand. We'll all be waiting until we're fucking dead for a fully open source processor. POWER9 is open enough all ready and can be used with 100% libre software. You also need to understand that RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture. There are no open source implementations out there at all. You seem to be under the impression that in order for a company to design chips around the RISC-V ISA that they need to release their schematics. This NOT the case, not at all. There can and will be plenty of closed source RISC-V chips on the market. Fucking idiot.

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It's going to take a decade AT LEAST before RISC-V has the microarch to compete with Intel and AMD.
I will be happy to support RISC-V but you're going to be waiting a long time with no freedom in the mean time(if ever).

Don't buy those chips. Someone will make a kickstarter or whatever to fund a fully open chip.

Also, if you can into FPGA, you can probably outright make yourself a RISC-V today. Someone may already have, in fact.

I'm OP and as far as I know this is the first time a modern POWER type CPU has been made affordable to the general public. There hasn't been a computer encumbered by proprietary code and powerful enough for basic desktop use for almost a decade so this is big news.

Ever since UEFI was introduced with locked bootloaders I've been sick of the x86 platform and am a bit hyped for any suitable replacement. I'm glad RISC-V is around but it'll take years before anything useful comes out of it for the average user, until then POWER and some older intel and AMD chips are all we have.

k

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If you don't know the difference or that there is a difference between UEFI and EFI then don't waste people's time by posting here.

I bet it's probably $1k for motherboard and CPU considering they still haven't mentioned the price. If I weren't NEET, I'd get one yesterday.

If it is secure boot you dislike, you can turn it off or put it under your control by replacing the Platform Key. I'm not a big fan of them replacing my good old BIOS, but UEFI is not nearly as bad as secure boot on ARM, where they use it to lock you out of your smartphone. I figure UEFI could be used to do this, but so far I haven't heard of it.

Why wouldn't you buy instead some FPGA gear and learn to make your own hardware? That's the only way we're going to get out of this mess. With actually open hardware, not by trusting yet another vendor.

holy fuck thats a sexy radeon pro
and damn that slim

That's what you get for buying a smartphone though. With ARM dev boards, you're in control and don't need to use secureboot. Also pick one that works with U-boot, not that RPi type stuff that needs Broadcom firmware blob to start the ARM cores.

I've only had to deal with UEFI when installing older versions of Windows for other people and it turns what was once an easy simple process into a nightmare. Thanks to UEFI telling someone who's somewhat interested in GNU/Linux to try it out on their own computer has become impossible, instead of hitting a key at the boot screen to get to a menu of boot options they need to follow a complicated tutorial just to run a live distro.


I want a real OS and programs to run on it not an expensive hobby computer that can barely do anything useful. And a vendor that has 'fully open computer' as a selling point while trying to get RYF certification from the FSF is anything but 'another vendor'.

And as an ex PPC user that only uses free software know that 99% of the programs I use will work fine on this platform. If a new architecture comes around that's better or POWER starts being locked down it'll be easy to switch.

power9 also infected with spectre and meltdown.

ARM boards can run a real OS and real software. Here's video of a Cubietruck with A20 SoC booting up Armbian and running some bloated GUI normie desktop apps.
BTW the A20 just has two 32-bit Cortex-A7 cores running at ~ 1 GHz. It's relatively low-end for ARM. OTOH, it wasn't affected at all by the recent Meltdown/Spectre type bugs.

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What do you mean by this? Do the SATA ports require proprietary firmware?

My issue with ARM is the non free video drivers most SoCs use. That board uses a Mali type GPU.
redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/GraphicsResearch#ARM-Mali-and-Lima

Lima project is still active, here's the site:
gitlab.freedesktop.org/lima/web/wikis/home
The Freescale i.MX6 SoC already have open source GPU driver.

POWER9 is here already and the Talos workstations are the most powerful RISC workstations ever made. RISC-V is a fucking meme. I'm not waiting the pipe dream of some fucking sperg when there's POWER9 out there right now for under $10k.

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I was under the impression the Lima driver wasn't in a usable state and abandoned. While it's good news these small SoCs boards aren't what I'm looking for in a desktop computer. In 2-3 years when they have a dozen cores and gigs of ram for a decent price maybe but not yet.

For a laptop it makes a lot more sense than the PPC notebook project mentioned in the OP.

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What kind of ricer chinesium have you been fucking buying?

into the trash it goes

The only smartphones I have are peoples old discarded ones, which I have unlocked. They are just lying there waiting for a project.


True. It is a pain in the ass and legacy BIOS mode is planned to be removed by 2020 *sigh*.

The Talos II had (optional) Microsemi SAS controllers on them which required non-free firmware, clearly has a Marvel SATA controller. The Marvell SATA chips don't require firmware.


Unless your standard for acceptable desktop CPU performance is a low end Pentium III you are a fucking idiot.


I would be willing to bet its under $1000 for the mobo and a 4 core CPU.

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How fucking stupid are you? Is this some high level Intel shilling?
High performance FPGAs have proprietary ARM cores and decoder cores, if you run a RISC-V CPU off an FPGA you're basically running a modified ARM CPU unless you want the slowest CPU in the west.
Oh yeah bro, billion dollar goal here we come!

Do you know how to wire PCIE cards and SATA/SAS hard drives to FPGA? I don't.

ARM and current RISC-V are too slow. Even the Caviums which cost $2k are slower in almost every benchmark compared to similarly priced Talos II.

Looks really nice. We're being spoiled with this, honestly. I fully support these guys.

You're retarded. The only thing free about RISC-V is the ISA. The chips SiFive make are 100% proprietary. OpenPower is more free than RISC-V.

A small update on the blackbird. was right so no depopulated board options this time, same BMC chip as the dual socket board and sound which seems like a waste. I wouldn't mind using a USB DAC and not having that built in.

My prediction is around $700 for the board and a 4 core CPU with 4 gigs of ram with a PSU and case.

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There's only a difference of you want to try really hard to be a contrarian autist

Do you realize just how much fucking work it would be to design your own processor architecture, write compilers for it, port thousands of programs to your architecture, and of course there's no telling whether you need to make custom peripherals too because obviously any peripherals and computer parts you can buy weren't designed for your custom architecture so there's potentially years' worth of engineering required on that part, oh and also you're the sole developer and maintainer for all of this so 100% of the time and money being poured into this project is yours. There's a reason why nobody actually does this.

reminder that power is not open

Most of the time peripherals are just memory mapped so as long as you use a common interconnect such as AXI (which was developed by ARM and made free to use a while back) then existing peripheral designs can be added to the chip and just work.

You are right about everything else though, even tech-litterate people give little thought to the countless man-hours it takes to design and produce even just the CPU in their computer.


I am not going to say its easy since I literally do that kind of stuff as a job but its not as hard as you probably think. Its just a case of if its worth it protip: it isnt.


They aren't 100% proprietary, SiFive put the Chisel code for their CPU up on github but thats only a small part of the design. Critical parts of their design, including the fucking DDR4 interface, is proprietary which has led to them literally telling the community to reverse engineer the binary init code if they want to make a libre boot option.

Chisel has made designing a CPU a much easier task than it was, but the hard part has always been the peripherals and drivers. If the SiFive guys weren't just a bunch of virtue signaling hipsters they would have created all the other peripherals as well (its not like the standards aren't open), but they didn't because thats a fuckton of work and outside the realm of their CompSci degrees.


It depends on what type of "FPGA", some are an ARM SoC with an FPGA attached via the AXI bus (such as the Zynq series) while most are just a standalone FPGA.


In the grand scheme of things those aren't that expensive and add some nice functionality that quite a few people would want.

I'm pretty sure this issue has been brought up before here and that someone who inquired about said you need to pay a few thousand dollars to become a member to their org to get the schematics. And that the only reason why they aren't public is because nobody has bothered to post them on the internet not because of NDAs.

I could be wrong but really the schematics not being made public isn't that big an issue for me. If I had to guess it's probably done this way because of vaguely worded laws on the export of technology that has encryption built into it.

What's the point of buying one when Gentoo ppc64le doesn't exist, right now?

Well I look at this problem from another angle: your OS and programs are too bloated and slow. Even a low-end ARM board like pic is enough resources for RISC OS, and probably Inferno too (since that one runs fine even on a stock Nintendo DS Lite).
Remember the more code you keep adding, the quicker you'll lose control of your project. Terry Davis was right: as you scale up, it doesn't just get bad, it gets worse. But it works in reverse in the other direction.
Anyway all the powerful hardware will do is devour extra resources, because the software never keeps up. It's always lagging behind and expecting the hardware to do the heavy lifting, as it adds tons more features/bugs.

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Nice meme dude kill yourself, also Power9 CPUs can run in both big and little endian modes.


Just because an OS could be made so minimal that it runs amazingly fast on a tiny SBC like the PiZero doesn't mean that it would be useful. Have you ever tried to compile and test kernel modules on such a device? its not a pleasant experience.

You might not need anything more than a single 1GHz ARM core and 512MB of RAM but some of us actually do more than just code hello world. I have written code that takes hours to run its test suite even with 64 threads at 4GHz and will happily eat up tens of GB of RAM, there is no fucking way I am switching to a PiZero even if my system sits mostly idle 99% of the time.


The thing is that even if you get the Verilog/VHDL for the Power9 cores its not as if you can verify that is whats actually in the CPU you buy. This is another thing the monkeys masturbating over SiFive seem to forget, just because a bunch of Chisel for a RISC-V CPU core is up on github doesn't mean that's whats in the silicon. The most useful thing you can have is the documentation for the hardware registers and such, because at least then you can write all the software that runs on it.

Moronix suspects around 1k dollarydoos is realistic expectation due to economy of scale and current POWER9 core prices. Shame, that's more than I'm willing to put into something that may end up a toy with little use.

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You could just set up a dedicated compilation machine and write a script that sends over files to be compiled with a makefile and you get the executable back once it's done.
I actually prefer to do my actual coding on an SBC, it limits distractions and is absolutely silent.


I'd get it at that price, as long as it'd run NetBSD.

Talos doesn't seem to be supported by NetBSD so...

You're like the kid that tells other kids real ninjas can kill people with a blade of grass. You don't know what you're talking about and you aren't going to use a $5 Pi as your main computer.

The blight of software bloat is real but only in consumer products where the upgrade treadmill keeps speeding up to sell newer products. For hardware like POWER that is to be used in super computers and data centers the operating systems and programs that are designed to run on it are often as lean and optimized as possible.

The most expensive thing about running a super computer today isn't the hardware but the energy cost so there's an economic incentive to squeeze out as much computational power as possible per watt. That's the reason why all the biggest super computers have been using GPUs instead of throwing more cores at it.
livescience.com/18072-rise-titans-exascale-supercomputers-leap-power-hurdle.html
cacm.acm.org/news/192296-supercomputings-super-energy-needs-and-what-to-do-about-them/fulltext


It may run in big and little endian modes but there's only the Adélie distro that uses BE. And so does FreeBSD which is in the process of being ported to POWER9. Once that gets ported NetBSD is sure to follow.


$1k with an 8 core CPU and complete system seems a reasonable price.

RISCOS runs on the Pi Zero, and it's useful. Nobody's going to do the kind of stuff you're talking about on it, but that's not what it's for.


Well I got news for you. Over the years my main computer has consisted of: Z80-based stuff, Amiga 500, 486DX/33, and then later just faster x86 shits. They were all perfectly useful, but what stands out is how utterly insane the bloatage has become in the past decade or so. Browsers like Firefox & Co. are a prime example. The whole thing sucks, and it's not work to keep going down that trend, just because everyone else is doing in. If you want to jump off a cliff with the rest of them, that's your problem.

It can accommodate any fan with enough duct tape.

>>>/auschwitz/
>>>/gaschamber/
>>>/oven/

It's not the browsers. It's the webappssites they run. Web browsers have been relegated to a platform for DOM/JavaScript applications called for retarded historical reasons "websites", and most of those sites are written by a bunch of niggers and pajeets on crack or worse, by hipsters. ANY browser capable of running that shite is gonna gobble RAM like OP semen.

Thats not entirely true, in terms of compute per watt manycore CPU based systems outperform GPU based systems and until recently the most powerful supercomputer was a manycore CPU based one. The reason why the US supercomputers use GPUs is because the manycore based ones are all Chinese and Japanese designs and Nvidia is US based.

Not that the trend is going to last since Xilinx just released their new FPGA compute platform which BTFOs even the best Nvidia GPUs by a significant margin.

I am pretty sure the default PPC Gentoo is BE since it was made for the Power7 CPUs which only supported BE. Typically PPC64 refers to BE while PPC64LE specifies LE.

When you consider that's 32 threads while the cheapest 32 thread x86 CPU is $700 alone its a pretty good deal.


I have used it in the past and always found it cumbersome, even with plugins to IDEs which automate the process.

Well if that is what works for you then stick with it, everyone is different.

Nothing new to report asides for an entry on their wiki, only things on there that hasn't been mentioned here are
Hopefully it'll support Ethernet bonding
wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Blackbird

IBM has an R&D Center in Israel

It's both though. Firefox is a huge codebase, bigger than the OpenBSD kernel. Starting it up on my computer, it sucks up ~ 160 MB, without even going anywhere (browser homepage is set to my home directory). On top of that it does shit in the background, or tries to anyway (since I have their site blocked):
1539000327965 addons.productaddons WARN Failed downloading XML, status: 0, reason: error
In comparison, I have a Links browser process that's about half that size, even though it's got a lot of html and big images cached in memory. Xorg itself is also about half that size. And everything else running on my machine uses much less memory.
I just started Netsurf also to compare. This browser only uses 30 MB, and starts up instantly compared to Firefox who's doing (or trying to do) who knows what in the background.

I wanna run OpenBSD on one but there isn't a PPC64 port reeeeee

Run it in qemu on a minimal netbsd install.

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well now it's actually affordable enough for us poor neets this time

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No, it's the websites. Both of the browsers you compared Firefox to have zero support for Javascript

You are confusing the Talos I with the Talos II, the first one was Power8 and never reached its funding goal while the second was Power9 and shipped on time for most orders.

I have no fucking idea what you are referring to.

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Netsurf doesn't have "zero support for javascript".

According to their most recent tweet they were wrong about 8 core CPUs being throttled due to power limitations. When it uses higher 18 or 22 core CPUs that's when it throttles down. No word from them yet if it'll support them officially but they seem to work.

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FPGAs can run OSs. youtube.com/watch?v=zYL42WQfgGI

Hmm, passive cooling?
Neat, I might just make a HTPC with this.

Why? You can get Ryzen ITX boards, and there are some incredibly tiny cases in that form factor now. I personally would want a Talos as a workstation, not a HTPC. Here is a video detailing what I mean:
youtube.com/watch?v=oa9xbnIdrFw

Shovel it down then.

wow great

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Troll harder son

Maybe someone is pissed that we're stuck with the Sforza interposer rather than the LaGrange one?
It would be more expensive, but we'd get
you do lose 6 PCIe 4.0 lanes for the openCAPI though... so I don't see the point, unless you already have some OpenCAPI cards to play with

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