
The POWER8 Libre System Looks Set to Fail, Now There's an AMD Libre Effort - protomyth
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=No-Talos-Now-AMD-Libre-Effort
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cathartes
As the articles mentions, this "AMD Libre Effort" isn't new--the Libreboot D16
was around before the Talos effort. I believe the D16 coreboot(/libreboot)
work was also done by Raptor Engineering, which is the group presently
pitching the Talos.

But I'll admit I presently have little faith these will take off. It seems
like the folks who should know enough to care about these efforts don't. At
least not enough to support them. HN articles like "I returned my 2016 MacBook
Pro with Touch Bar" garner hundreds of upvotes and comments within hours of
posting even weeks after this horse was beaten to an unrecognizable pulp on HN
following the Apple announcement. And don't forget the hunt for a new
"development laptop" (translation: a MacBook Pro-like laptop not made by Apple
that somehow doesn't sacrifice any of the trendy/cool and usual dog tricks
we've all grown accustomed to having in Apple's products) that also keeps
coming up. Talos receives ... crickets chirping. What does this say about the
state of our industry where even the tech literates of HN are barely
distinguishable in their buying behaviour from the general consumer? It's
almost like many of the folks here don't even see vendor lock-down as an
actual problem, or at least don't give truly libre computing platforms more
than a passing thought even when actual opportunities to produce them emerge.

~~~
mixedCase
> Talos receives ... crickets chirping.

5 grand for a CPU+Mobo no better than a USD400 Intel equivalent in performance
with extremely higher energy requirements... unfortunately means dead before
arrival. Specially with RISC-V being so promising.

Yes, hardware development is expensive, but most people aren't rich.

~~~
cathartes
No, Talos is certainly not a cheap board, but I believe it was clearly
intended by its developer to proverbially break ground for a new ecosystem
that wasn't vendor-controlled--with increased adoption, these would
undoubtedly get cheaper and better down the line.

While most people aren't rich, there is certainly enough wealth among the HN
readership, as evidenced by their interest in Apple products, high-end
smartphones, DSLRs, Teslas, etc. And even if people couldn't afford to get a
workstation, they could have still donated to the cause. That this didn't
happen says to me that enough people honestly just didn't give a damn. This
comes off as very strange to me, because people are clearly outraged by the
conduct of MS, Intel, and others. Buying a Talos means a chance to start
stripping some of the usual antagonists in this saga of their hegemony on the
computing community at large. Personally, I'd be willing to live with more
expensive computers in the short-term if it meant a check on their influence
in the long-term.

And performance-wise, Talos with an unclocked 8 core 190 watt POWER8 promised
a bit better than the i7-5960X workstation I use at home (not a $400 chip),
and consumed only modestly more power than same. So that doesn't strike me as
a strong argument against it. But if the only reason this product would appeal
to people is that it needed to offer equivalent performance to its x86
counterparts at roughly equiv prices, then we're in dire straits--that misses
the entire point of having a computer that guarantees your access right down
to the hardware and firmware. Until now, we've only enjoyed this luxury on
small embedded boards (e.g., BeagleBone), which are toys in comparison.

Finally, RISC-V may be promising, but it's not here--POWER8 is, and POWER9 is
already in the works. Why hold your breath for what may prove to be vaporware
apart from prototypes in an academic or company R&D setting?

------
protomyth
I will never understand non-Intel chip makers. Is it so friggin hard to build
and ITX / ATX motherboard that people can build a PC with? How do these folks
expect to get mind share with no entrance ramp?

