Talos - IBM power8 based cpu, less blobs?

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ible

ible

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ible said:
the lowest cost being $1135
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About the same price as my Pentium II - 400Mhz processor when it first came out.

Also, funny enough almost every day I walk by the testers at work where they test the functionality of these processors...
 
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This is a Workstation, not a regular PC.

The x86 based ones in similar configuration are around the same price

Usually they are used for very heavy computation like video editing, CAD, CAM, rendering, also at some hospitals and research facilities.


You can check Dell Precision and HP Z series for example.

An maxed out, Dual CPU chassis can reach a 50-60000$ or even more... :)
 
Linux on a PPC is quite usable, not entirely sure what kind of use-case he has for such a beefy Power 8 system, I could use it at work as a fairly good upgrade to my 11 year old Power 5 AIX system in my office I use for test pattern generation...
 
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Linux-SWAT said:
Do they look happy ?
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I suppose so? I eat lunch with the one of the programmers/engineers that develops the test programs for the test platform it runs on, he isn't a happy guy, mostly because he's bringing up Power 9 right now.
 
Can I integrate QEMU into the firmware and run a x86 OS on it?

Well I couldn't but would it be possible?
 
TheOldOne said:
Can I integrate QEMU into the firmware and run a x86 OS on it?

Well I couldn't but would it be possible?
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Even if its possible, what is the point ?
To run a Windows on PPC?

Why don't you just get a regular x86 Workstation for that.


Debian, RedHat, Trisquel... and so on, are PPC compatible out of the box.
 
TheOldOne said:
Can I integrate QEMU into the firmware and run a x86 OS on it?

Well I couldn't but would it be possible?
Click to expand...

I believe the video on the crowdsupply page was done in some virtual machine, possibly QEMU, but Idon't remember well.

Yes, it is expensive, but if at least you can own it, that's at least soem reason to buy something. Buying an X86 computer
that will belong to the builder (and their future owners, governments, whoever breaks into their systems or who knows who)
and by design (for some reason I find it more tolerable when it is by accident, like security bugs) is arguably a worse waste
of money.
 
Posing the question of whether this is within budget for a lot of players who value their privacy, I wonder if they know, or will do anything about it.
If you think 4k dollars is a lot, ask yourself what your government is using on IT that never gets used.
Certainly those numbers are gross for any western government, and reasonably I think this is poses a better alternative to even the stuff most of them do use.
 
I certainly wish the project all the best, and hope that we can start seeing more booting openness soon.

wouldn't mind 256GB of RAM, but probably should find a use for the 32GB I stuck in a small-time server first...
 
You could buy a Titanium board based system and run RISC OS on it, if all you care about is binary blobs. I don't know for sure whether that uses no binary blobs, but the main source code is available to view, and it doesn't use the 3D bits of the chip (and the board doesn't have wifi as far as I can tell).

Linux on it might be similarly secure, but I don't know how it boots on that system. RISC OS just has a JMP instruction at address 0 and that's where the system starts from.

But the best way to make a relatively secure system is to take any computer and just never connect it to the internet. So any cheap PC would do the job for that, although I don't know how well Windows 10 functions without an internet connection these days.
 
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