
Talos II - Kostic
https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/
======
vectorEQ
Talos™ II drives the state of the art of secure computing forward. Talos™ II
gives you — and only you — full control of your machine's security. Rest
assured knowing that only your authorized software and firmware are running
via POWER9's secure boot features. Don't trust us? Look at the secure boot
sources yourself — and modify them as you wish. That's the power of Talos™ II.

That is fkin nice to be honest. There is so few which do this. totally already
worth the price. (open source bios/boot procedures etc.). It's a total mess
trying to get such a setup on a x86 server machine. i think there is a grand
total of 1 server board which support coreboot (?)

~~~
samstave
I just learned about laptops from a Bay Area company yesterday: purism

HTTPS://puri.sm

Coreboot based laptops...

~~~
olympus
The main criticism against Purism laptops is that they still contain
proprietary blobs (from Intel) in the coreboot payload. We have no way of
knowing what's in those blobs.

Purism tries to be free, and is a step up from other vendors, but doesn't go
far enough for some people.

~~~
samstave
Thanks for the info... what's a better/the best option?

Also, this is a laptop, so a diff class than server/desktop models - so may
not be fair to even compare them ?

~~~
nextos
The very best option right now (and dirty cheap, ~$200 new) is to get an Asus
C201P / Flip Chromebook. It uses a Rockchip ARM CPU, and if you disable 3D
acceleration (which is slow anyway) and use an external wireless antenna, you
don't have any closed firmware in your computer. Not even CPU microcode
firmware.

This is unique. Of course, it's a machine targeted by Libreboot:

[https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/c201.html](https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/c201.html)

I guess that if you install GuixSD, given all binary packages can be verified
against the source, and there are some decent sandboxing facilities you can
get pretty great security.

~~~
rekado
At the moment GuixSD doesn't yet work on ARM. Not much is missing and you can
use Guix as a package manager on top of some other variant of the GNU system,
but GuixSD on ARM is not quite ready yet. Give it a couple more weeks.

------
CrystalGamma
I applaud them for pricing the board at around $2000 (though with the CPUs
it's obviously more expensive). This sits squarely within my budget for a
high-performance and trustworthy workstation like this (even accounting for
taxes). However I would also have payed for faster CPUs (up to ~$1000 each for
an 8- or 12-core processor).

Does anyone know if all POWER9 processors fit into that socket, and if yes, if
there is anyone selling POWER9 in retail quantities (preferably in Europe).

Another question that isn't answered on their page is the payment options.
Like many fellow Europeans I don't have a credit card, so if that is the only
way to pay, I'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to buy this.

I wonder how much power this system will consume on idle? I read IBM
significantly improved the power management with POWER9, so here's hoping 8
cores of this won't take significantly more than the 110W idle of my 8-core
Piledriver system.

~~~
Kiro
> Like many fellow Europeans I don't have a credit card, so if that is the
> only way to pay, I'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to buy this.

Why would that be the only option? Never seen a shop accept credit cards only.
I only have a debit card and have never had any problems.

~~~
danpalmer
I think this is a common misunderstanding. The US seems to use "credit card"
to refer to all payment cards, but is rarely limit to just _credit_ cards.

I think the distinction between credit and debit cards is more commonly made
in Europe.

~~~
CrystalGamma
I mostly mean that I don't have a card that can be used for payment over the
usual networks like MasterCard (unless those “Maestro”-cards do work, which I
doubt), Visa or AmEx …

~~~
Nullabillity
IME Maestro cards generally don't work, but there are MasterCard debit cards
that do.

------
arca_vorago
I have been keeping an eye on Raptor and Talos for a while now, and it's super
exciting to see another cpu-platform with security and openess in mind. As a
GNU+Linux guy, has anyone had any experience with GNU+Linux on the Power
platform? What kind of differences could I expect. I've been itching to build
a new AMD Naples 64 core (2x cpu) server, but I have to admit I'm tempted to
just do AMD Ryzen for my upcoming desktop build and do a Talos II for the
server.

~~~
cat199
No idea recently, but even back in the apple PPC days pretty much everything
worked.

The things that didn't were typically lesser used desktoppy things or more
community written software that didn't take endianness into consideration. If
you're not afraid to dig into sources alot of things only took adding an
endianness hack / byteswap to certain lines to make things work properly.

Also to check into are some languages/compilers/interpreters simply might not
have a backend for your CPU. If you use any of these critically you might
double check; common things like perl/python/java/ruby should be fine.

I'd expect most server-side / computation oriented things should be fine-
desktop, etc, not so sure especially since noone is making any power based
workstations these days, though remote GUI mgmt is still useful in some
annoying cases

Overall stability, barring per-platform issues should be fine as well.

basically, if you don't mind getting your hands a bit dirty from time to time,
it should be okay; not sure of support for this particular board / firmware/
etc though..

hopefully someone with recent experience can confirm

~~~
jabl
Most Linux work for modern POWER seems to be for the ppc64le target, which
runs the CPU in little endian mode.

That being said, there's probably a lot of libraries with x86-64 ASM kernels
in them which will run slower if they have to use the generic C/whatever
version on power.

~~~
hsivonen
In terms of network effects of ISA-specific optimizations, it's problematic
that not only is the workstation so expensive but POWER8/9 cloud availability
seems to be only for orgs that buy a lot of compute time.

If you are a dev who isn't being paid by e.g. IBM or Red Hat to work on
ppc64le stuff, it seems hard to get access to running your code on real
hardware and running on qemu doesn't really make sense for optimizations.

It seems to me that the ISA could benefit from scaling down so that more
developers had access.

~~~
CrystalGamma
They're already scaling down … in the POWER8 Talos campaign, the cheapest CPU
option was something like $1300, the CPU they're offering here is only $300.
And the board, because you don't need expensive memory buffer chips anymore,
is almost half the price as then.

~~~
zymhan
Yeah previously it was over $4,000 for the board and CPU, this is nearly half
the price.

If they can keep this up, I could actually fork over the money for the 3rd
gen.

~~~
torpcoms
Talos Model 3.

Oh wait, wrong company.

------
e12e
It seems they're not all that interested in marketing to end users, despite
the talos ii "bare-bones" kit available for pre-order on the site - I couldn't
find any reviews of the previous talos I/power8 system online - i would assume
they'd at the very least get someone like anadtech, ars or one of the many
Linux journals to do some hands-on testing / free marketing?

I mean, if I had too much cash, I'd be tempted to get one, but I'd probably be
even.more likely if I could see some blender rendering benchmarks and Linux
kernel compile timings etc...

~~~
wmf
I don't think Talos I was ever released. They created a backlash last time by
hyping an unavailable and unaffordable product so maybe the low-key approach
is better.

~~~
CrystalGamma
There was a crowdfunding campaign, but it failed. This new product however can
be directly preordered (and for much lower price: the board costs little more
than half of what Talos 1 would have and the CPUs they are offering right now
cost about a quarter of the _cheapest_ option back then)

------
rwmj
Prices starting at $4,750 [sic]:
[https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/purchase.html](https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/purchase.html)

~~~
krylon
That price does not include RAM or a GPU.

Even a bare bones motherboard costs more than $2,000.

I have no doubt this an awesome machine, but that price puts it outside my
budget range. :(

~~~
PeCaN
That's par for the course for a workstation. Actually on the affordable end,
which is surprising given that it's using POWER9 which I figured would be
expensive (by virtue of not being x86).

~~~
krylon
It depends, I think.

Compared to the RISC based propietary Unix workstations of 20 years ago, the
price is really good.

At work, our CAD people have machines that are in the € 1,000 - € 1,500 price
range. Those machines are fairly big and powerful, at least compared to our
regular desktop PCs.

It is possible to spend more money on a workstation, if one wants or needs to,
and get a more powerful machine. Far more.

Depending on your use case, our CAD machines might be lightweights. But the
amount of computing power you can get for € 1,000-1,500 these days is insane
compared to the landscape 20 or even 10 years ago.

I am certain the Talos II offers good performance for its price. My point was
that I would like to have a machine that comes without any opaque blobs or
"management engine", but I am not going to spend that much money on it. I'd be
happy go get such a machine in the € 500-1,000 price range at correspondingly
lower performance.

------
Cieplak
Will it support FreeBSD? Of course it would run it, but I don't have time
anymore to write my own device drivers.

------
SkyMarshal
This is excellent, glad to see these guys trying again. They attempted a
crowdfund of this project a year or two ago and didn't raise enough, which was
a huge disappointment. Hope the second try is the charm.

------
qubex
Despite the high cost (when compared to 'comparable' _x86_64_ hardware) I am
very excited by this.

However I'm concerned by desktop Linux support and graphics driver support. It
would be really miserable to get this kind of machine and then have a
lacklustre desktop experience (though I'd be using it as a high-horsepower
workstation, it would need to be able to dump computations onto the GPU and
use ordinary free productivity software on the side).

~~~
CrystalGamma
Given that they're selling systems with AMD cards in them, I would imagine
that AMDGPU/RadeonSI at least would very well.

~~~
JohnZi
They had a video of playing Unreal Tournament (the new one) on a Talos 1 with
a AMD card.

As long as a card with Open Source driver support gets used it should work
mostly fine. Back then they need a 4line patch to play ut4.

------
freekh
Looks interesting, I didn't even know that you still could buy PowerPC she.
Anyone know of pros and cons?

~~~
dom0
POWER was historically the architecture for "I don't care about efficiency, I
just want a fast machine!". This hasn't really changed. For some applications
they are still substantially faster than any x86 system, but they're almost
always far less power efficient. That's why they're not widely adopted in data
centres.

~~~
cat199
> That's why they're not widely adopted in data centres.

I don't think that's the entire picture..

If you're running systems at full capacity, throughput vs power consumption
becomes a relevant equation - e.g. if the chip runs code 2x faster but is 1.5x
less power efficient, I'm still saving .5 of power to get the same data
processed.. Not sure of power consumption specifics for POWER, but they've
been about to 4x faster than PC for some workloads.. E.g. 4GHz CPU + giant
cache and 4x the registers will tear through matrices like a hot knife in
butter... Also, there's the question of density vs performance - e.g. I only
need X sq units of datacenter to process this dataset within the timewindow..

Also, historically the only people 'needing' power and willing to pay for it
were companies with deeper pockets who wouldn't mind shelling out for AIX and
the rest of the IBM stuff that goes along; linux is to some extent an
'afterthought'/'second tier' OS for this market though that has been changing
in last few years. People using IBM or AIX have typically tended towards being
risk averse and have been on POWER for ages; for everyone else, people haven't
wanted to spend the money to migrate to a platform controlled by one company,
etc.

------
mariuolo
I wish I could afford one.

------
bitL
How would this compare to a ThreadRipper/EPYC system? Any advantages in favor
of Talos?

~~~
rekado
Do you not consider the freedom aspects (e.g. sources to the secure boot
implementation, no x86, etc) as advantages in favour of Talos?

~~~
bitL
That's definitely nice! Any other advantages?

~~~
orbifold
The Power9 should be more performant than EPYC/ThreadRipper and CAPI gives you
higher memory bandwidth to a GPU.

~~~
striking
Are there any benchmarks that I can look at for this?

~~~
milcron
Here is a comparison of POWER8 vs Intel Xeon
[http://www.anandtech.com/show/10435/assessing-ibms-
power8-pa...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/10435/assessing-ibms-
power8-part-1/3)

------
pepijndevos
I seem to remember some similar board based on RISC, anyone know what I'm
thinking of?

~~~
wmf
There have been some Freescale PowerPC boards in recent years.

------
gbrown_
Only 4 core CPUs, a tad disappointing.

~~~
torpcoms
It is; the question is, can you put the 24-core chips from IBM in the same
socket? For that matter, what on earth is the socket name for POWER9 (or
POWER8)?

~~~
torpcoms
After some more looking around, talking to someone on reddit.com/r/openpower,
and looking at the new site information; the thought is that these are 50 mm ×
50 mm Sforza sockets and the 4-core CPUs are 12-cores with 8 cores disabled.

------
pedrocr
_> Like many fellow Europeans I don't have a credit card, so if that is the
only way to pay, I'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to buy this._

I find this surprising. At least in Portugal it's now common to buy stuff
online with a credit card, either with an actual card or with one of those
simple services the bank provides where they generate a virtual card on demand
for you to use for a single purchase.

~~~
madez
Why do you find it surprising? They cost money and provide little benefit (for
me).

Some vendors accept them but charge extra for it, which I consider fair.

~~~
anoother
I'm not sure about the rest of Europe, but in the UK most credit cards don't
cost money.

Unless you don't pay your bills, of course. But direct debit takes care of
that.

~~~
madez
They surely do cost money, but you pay it indirectly. Somebody first pays the
fees and the card itself, and ultimately you are going to pay.

There are alternatives that are cheaper and work just as fine. Thankfully not
every country is already majorly infected by credit cards.

~~~
lmm
Either the merchant agreements forbid charging credit card fees, or it's just
a norm that our businesses have adopted (over here we strongly believe in the
advertised price being the actual price - we don't have tax-added-on-
afterwards or mail-in rebates like in the US), but either way you very rarely
get charged a fee directly. Some places will have a minimum spend to pay by
credit card, and low-end shops won't accept Amex because their fees are
higher, but for most the card fees are built into the prices that you pay even
if you're paying cash.

~~~
madez
> for most the card fees are built into the prices that you pay even if you're
> paying cash.

That is unfair, and not all businesses do that. I criticize it and prefer
shops that don't.

~~~
lmm
Remember cash isn't free either - armoured cars and the like cost money, I
wouldn't be surprised if the overall work involved in handling cash ended up
being more costly than card fees.

I guess I don't object in principle to a cash discount (a card fee would annoy
me), but those tend to exist for the sake of tax evasion, which I won't
support.

~~~
pedrocr
>I wouldn't be surprised if the overall work involved in handling cash ended
up being more costly than card fees.

This is definitely the case for the underlying costs as you can imagine. Doing
an online transaction is much cheaper these days than operating trucks, cash
sorting, etc. It's however not always the case that banks will charge
merchants less for cards than for cash handling unfortunately. This has
maintained the weight of cash as a payment method past it's actual usefulness.

------
nesukun
I won't get anywhere near it considering what happened to the first Talos
[http://prey.wikia.com/wiki/Talos_I](http://prey.wikia.com/wiki/Talos_I)

------
onli
To set on PCI-E 4.0 is a mistake. PCI-E 5.0 is right around the corner. It
might be backward compatible, but if you buy it for that it would be better to
wait.

~~~
bryanlarsen
ETA for PCI-E 5.0 in consumer equipment is 2020 or 2021. That's actually
fairly quick considering that PCIE 4.0 is just starting to trickle out, but I
wouldn't call that "right around the corner". I do expect many providers to
skip PCI-E 4.0. OTOH the delta from 4 to 5 is a lot smaller than the delta
from 3 to 4, so running PCI-E 4 is also a good mechanism for getting a head
start on 5.

