On Fri, 18 May 2018 12:11:49 +0100 Peter Kay <syllops...@syllopsium.co.uk> wrote:
> >4-core (5-core?) 1.5Ghz, 8GB DDR4 ECC RAM, two >PCIe slots (one one-lane > >and one two-lane PCIe 2.0?), SATA, gigabit ethernet, >microSD, HDMI, > >UART > > Neat, but horribly slow and expensive. Raptor CS, on the other hand, are > releasing the POWER9 based Talos II Lite soon, and also (apparently) the bare > motherboard without chassis. Info at raptorcs.com Indeed! Very nice offering, especially recent Lite. On the other hand I can't resist but it looks to me more and more like swan's song of POWER world. Such machine should be here 5 years ago at least if not right after demise of Apple from PowerPC world. That to just keep engineering on the platform. Now, OpenBSD is still supporting PPC but just in 32bit and that even on old and drying supply of 64bits Apple's G5s. Foolish estimation: if you have a set of machines you would need 2 years and 2-3 engineers to work on this platform to get it somewhere. Lot of effort to just support very fragile world of POWER/PowerPC. Even Freescale, err, NXP, err, Qualcom seems to be leaving it for ARM. Why would anyone else stay/support it? IBM is leaving hardware world slowly more to services so you can spent a lot of time and then just wake up one morning finding out that there will be no future POWER chips from IBM anymore -- that's depending on one vendor CPU supply. Fragile position. '90s taught me that movement is done from the down to up and not from up to down. Intel killed all those nice workstation provides of '90s very slowly, but killed them at the end. It was not Sun/Digital/SGI killing intel together. Intel from the down of slow 486, then Pentium and then final straw was Pentium Pro. Sudenly PCs were faster and there was no need to stay on more expensive nice machines -- except perhaps for software support. The question is, if something like that can't happen between ARM and Intel and then later on between RISC-V and ARM. For example Cavium's ThunderX2 looks very nice. In RISC-V, please see presentation of Esperanto Technologies (high-speed chips with a lot of various accelerators done on 7nm TSMC). > It'll probably still be a bit slow and expensive compared to a Xeon, and it > won't work run OpenBSD out of the box, but it is open. > Yes, open, but do I really need to move back to Linux world? I kind of left it (as main workstation OS) to OpenSolaris recent years migrating from it to OpenBSD. Do I really need to go back to Linux mess? My bet is on ARMv8 and later on RISC-V. I hope both future is more bright than of IBM's hardware division... And life's simply too short to bet/invest a lot of time on yet another architecture and see its failure...
