On 11/22/2017 10:11 PM, Yuraeitha wrote:
Nice! I did not know about TALOS, seems really interesting. I had kinda lost
any hope for POWER CPU's since IBM are such big slackers when it comes to
getting POWER marketed or supporting motherboard developers in the mass
markets. The way I understand it, it's significantly easier to make
motherboards, compared to making CPU's, and existing RAM technology can be
used. So it was a bit mind-boggling for me that no one went ahead and made
POWER motherboards. Not enough interest by the people at least capable of
making motherboards, I guess? or my understanding of it falls short perhaps.
Actually a lot of companies made POWER 8 motherboards you just didn't
hear about it (as they aren't mass market)
POWER 9 is a lot more accessible so there will be many more partners, as
more components are now on the CPU die it is cheaper to make
motherboards (which is also why TALOS 2 is a reality) and thus more will
be made.
Look up the OpenPOWER foundation, despite all the really bad things they
have done in the past IBM is making many strides for computing freedom.
What other company releases this level of information on their CPU's?
their hardware? lets you fix your own microcode and gives you the
documentation to teach yourself how to do so?
But either way, TALOS is really good news. Though its a bit sad that its so
pricy and only for desktops.
The price is average for hardware in its performance class, like I said
there are many lower priced (and lower performance) options but now we
are lucky enough to have one in the very high performance sphere.
Especially as mobile devices are becoming so powerful, that desktops are less
relevant for most normal people these days. It makes the desktop market
smaller, and TALOS even harder to sell to normal people and thereby probably
also less likely to drop in price then too. And as a result, much less likely
to come to laptops as well then. Unless something changes? Seems like an evil
unbreakable circle, unless a shortcut is being cut out somewhere.
TALOS 2 isn't meant for "normal people" - even I would be hard pressed
to use the full capabilities of even the lower end POWER9 CPU's to the
point where I would really be getting my moneys worth.
The market segment is the small corporation concerned about IP theft
that wants high performance secure computing and may already be using
POWER systems, not grandma and not even you or me but I will however be
purchasing one once I find full time employment again as I believe in
the cause and I want to support them.
It is the first time one can get a free firmware system off the shelf
with the latest and greatest technology, no matter the cost they have
truly done something special here.
For one, the price is waaaaaay to high for most regular people.
What hopes do we have for cheaper hardware, made available for the more popular
devices (like laptops and phones), I wonder.
You already have cheaper/slower hardware, such as the KCMA-D8 and
KGPE-D16 (libre firmware ports and OpenBMC ports made by the same
company) or the open source init G505S laptop.
You can make a libre firmware workstation that can play the latest games
in a VM for $500 total.
In the case of TALOS 2 it fills the gap in the ultra high performance
category, where as the D8 and D16 are the low-medium performance category.
It's so frustrating, getting hopes, but at the same time, just enough out of
reach, dangling there like a carrot on a stick, laughing at you. Frustrating...
also, lmao, indeed, the claims and lack of results to show for, are gonna make
purism a laughing stock for years to come. Maybe if they involved the open
source community and got a huge backing with a single voice, but instead, many
open source people got offended by their overestimated claims. The irony...
They still refuse to take the input of the community in to account, but
constantly attack people like me who give them the constructive
criticism they deserve - they say "oh we are doing our best to free ME"
aka waiting and hoping someone else will do so. They have no hardware
engineers on staff so no one to tell them how impossible and pointless
that is.
The only thing they are good at is marketing, it is truly incredible the
amount of spin and slick lingo they have on their website - hell there
are even paid shills on various mailinglists who attack me and others on
a regular basis.
They have easily made a libre laptop via either the AMD FT3 mobile
platform (high end when they released their second laptop) or hell even
a KCMA-D8 in a custom fab case with a custom battery, keyboard, etc and
a 35W 8 core CPU - heavy? sure free? definitely.
On the coreboot website it says that you can't have free firmware for
the latest and greatest x86-64 stuff due to the level of churn, but they
still don't listen and refuse to change course and admit they made bad
choices.
Even leah rowe made right and finally paid her (monetary) debts, we can
only hope purism pays their (philosophical) debt to the community with
all the energy and money they have sucked away from real computing
freedom projects.
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