
Talos Secure Workstation - ralmidani
https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-systems/talos-secure-workstation
======
bitshiffed
This machine is way out of my price range; but I am very interested in the
frequently mentioned "open-toolchain FPGAs" in their descriptions.

AFAIK there are only a handful of very specific chips that you can currently
get away with not using vendor tools against, like ICE40s.

I would be willing to put a fair amount of money into crowdfunding for better
open source -full- toolchains for FPGAs (especially something targeting Xilinx
devices). The vendor tools, aside from being closed source, are all huge
bloated disasterpieces, and none available for macOS.

~~~
blackguardx
Yeah and unless the FPGA manufacturers start supporting open toolchains, it
can end in an instant when the parts become EOL and Lattice (maker of the
ICE40 series) starts obfuscating.

The problem with open toolchains from the manufacturer's point of view is that
they have nothing to gain and everything to lose. They don't want to sell
chips one at a time to hobbyists. They want to sell them millions at the time
to GM and other companies. In their mind, open toolchains buy them nothing but
leave them open to competitors stealing their designs. I'm not saying this
view is accurate, it is just how chip vendors think.

------
jff
I was pretty shocked that they're asking $18k for a workstation and hoping to
get $3.7 million total. I was rather excited for it but this project is
stillborn in my opinion. I may end up having work order one of IBM's basic
dual-Power8 systems, which are only $6k:
[http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/s821lc/index.ht...](http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/s821lc/index.html)

~~~
ploxiln
I think it's odd that they offer no cheaper workstation configuration - that
$18k price includes maxed-out ram, a higher-end workstation class graphics
card (32GB ram on the card! much cheaper workstation cards exist), and an LSI
SAS controller card instead of using built-in sata3. A more minimal
configuration could probably shave $10k off the price (but maybe they thought
it wouldn't make sense to pay $8k for a minimal config).

~~~
tpearson-raptor
Hi, Timothy here from Raptor Engineering.

As mentioned on a different comment, we are investigating adding a lower-spec
machine to the lineup due to popular demand. We had not anticipated the level
of demand for a pre-built workstation with a less powerful configuration.

Most likely, this new configuration would scale the RAM down and replace the
high-end workstation GPU with a mid-range consumer card. More information will
be posted to the campaign page when we have this option available.

------
lathiat
I want one of these badly, but sadly the price is not for me. I hope they find
a big enough market, but I'm not really convinced.

$4,100 for the motherboard, add $1,135 for the slowest CPU and your minimum
buy-in is $5,235 or $7,450 for the top-end 12-core (we can assume that RAM,
GPU, Storage costs are the same as any other system)

------
shasheene
IBM POWER looks to be the most performant libre computing platform in
existence, but $4100 for Raptor Engineering's Talos is still too pricey for me
-- I'd suggest US$1000 to US$1500 for plain ATX motherboard + CPU, supporting
affordable standard commercial consumer components is probably the point where
crowd funding is viable as a desktop computer for regular software engineers
and tinkerers (well the kind of people who seriously consider buying a
Novena).

But Talos is expensive as it uses a custom board, with custom open-source
firmware at relatively low volume, so a more affordable Talos desktop is
probably infeasible.

I guess for that it needs to be a desktop (not a workstation) -- so a much
more stripped down system dropping expensive components such as the FPGAs that
a secure internet connected server, or a typical software engineer's desktop
don't need.

In other IBM POWER news, Google has recently announced it's Open Compute
Project POWER9 server -- the Zaius P9 Server:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709995)

------
ralmidani
I am considering pledging $250, to support this effort within my means, and to
be able to try things out with a VM. But I see no details on how much RAM,
computing power, and storage space will be provided.

Edit: If the VM provided is anemically underpowered, the platform will be
little more than a curiosity for me.

~~~
tpearson-raptor
We have not worked out the exact specifications of the virtual machines at
this time; we need to balance usability against overall cost and that depends
to some extent on the number of signups we receive.

Initial targets were a dual core VM with 2GB RAM and 10GB storage. Would you
consider this underpowered or acceptable?

~~~
ralmidani
Not bad at all. :)

Edit: In terms of CPU and RAM, this is comparable (in the sense they can be
compared) to a $20/month VM at Digital Ocean.

As far as strorage, have you considered using standard drives in addition to
enterprise SAS drives?

Are you trying to go mainstream with the platform as quickly as possible, or
just trying to carve out a niche for now?

~~~
tpearson-raptor
The cost difference between SAS and SATA isn't all that much, and SAS has some
nice benefits especially when used in a RAID type configuration.

We see this first run as targeting more niche and corporate / government type
use cases, however (should funding be met) subsequent runs after this first
one may be targeted more at a mainstream audience. It's far too early to tell
at this stage.

------
ralmidani
If you're interested in building your own system, you can buy the CPU
separately:

[https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-
systems/power8-...](https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-
systems/power8-cpus)

The price range is $1,135-$3,350.

------
fnoobor
This is great! Many people have been waiting for this. Potentially it'll also
come with other boot systems.

Though I'd choose the mainboard only + CPU and add an old, passive GPU for
price reasons

If you can't afford the mainboard or a full system, please pledge some money
for user freedom.

------
ralmidani
A less-expensive configuration has become available. For $8,750 you get an
8-core CPU, 128GB of RAM, a Radeon RX 480 GPU, and 2 x 2TB hard drives.

I really want to see this project succeed. I am leaning toward buying just the
motherboard and CPU. I prefer SSDs, and don't need massive storage anyway.

------
walrus01
If you want Power8 stuff to come down in price to something that is reasonably
affordable (even __only __double the cost of a current generation core i7 and
$190 motherboard), what 's needed is for the top-ten Taiwanese motherboard
manufacturers to make standard ATX format boards for it. Period. Tyan, ASUS,
Supermicro, MSI, ECS, etc.

~~~
ralmidani
They probably want to see interest before making a large investment in Power8.

Interestingly, some Asus and GIGABYTE motherboards for AMD and/or Intel
processors support Libreboot:

[https://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/](https://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/)

So in theory, if this campaign succeeds, it may catch their attention, and we
may have more affordable options down the road.

~~~
fnoobor
_They_ don't support Libreboot, but Libreboot supports them. They (Asus,
Gigabyte etc.) give a damn about free/libre boot firmware, let alone
Libreboot.

That's why we need companies like Raptor Engineering! Vote with your money...

------
buttershakes
These are expensive, but the power 8 systems are really fantastic. I used to
work extensively with power servers when they first started offering Linux
support, and they just have fantastic performance characteristics under heavy
load.

~~~
effie
> _they just have fantastic performance characteristics under heavy load_

That sounds interesting, but could you elaborate? The comparisons to
comparable Intel systems I've seen did not seem to suggest anything like that,
it was more like sometimes Power wins, sometimes x86 does and both are quite
similar performance wise. What kind of tasks did you observe to perform well?

------
wmf
Seriously, do not buy this at these prices. Briggs & Stratton servers are much
cheaper and you can use the money you saved to muffle the sound.
[http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/09/08/refreshed-ibm-
power-l...](http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/09/08/refreshed-ibm-power-linux-
systems-add-nvlink/)

~~~
wnoise
The hook for this over other ones is that this is designed to have no binary
blobs required, completely open and auditable firmware, etc. It's for people
that care about security and are disgusted by the trash-fire that is the
lowest levels of our computing stack.

[https://secure.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php](https://secure.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php)

~~~
wmf
AFAIK all the OpenPower boxes use the same firmware, so why not buy the
cheaper Supermicro ones?

And on a practical level we know that people who bleat about firmware blobs
are not going to spend $6,000 to escape from them.

~~~
tpearson-raptor
Hi, Timothy here from Raptor Engineering.

The lesser expensive servers do not use the same firmware as Talos™ or even
the more expensive IBM systems. The cheaper machines reduce cost by using
proprietary firmware components wherever possible, and by dropping as many
features as the market will bear at the lower price point. This is not the
market segment that Talos™ is aimed at.

~~~
seanp2k2
I believe their point is that the segment this is aimed at might not exist. I
suppose that's why it's a campaign :) I'd also be interested for $1-2k even,
but not at new car prices.

~~~
tpearson-raptor
Regarding the cost of non-consumer hardware, especially hardware in the $1k
range, I encourage you to check out the presentation entitled "Talos™,
OpenPOWER™, and the World Beyond x86" at [https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-
computing-systems/talos-s...](https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-
systems/talos-secure-workstation#a-world-beyond-x86)

That presentation offers several potential explainations for why that
particular market segment is locked to proprietary, non-libre offerings only.

------
rbanffy
18,000 is kind of pricey. If they had a less fully loaded machine for a more
affordable price, I'd be tempted.

~~~
tpearson-raptor
Hi, Timothy from Raptor Engineering here.

Given the strong and consistent feedback on this we are looking at adding a
more minimal pre-assembled option. Most likely this would involve scaling the
RAM count down and dropping the GPU to a mid-range consumer card. More
information will be posted to the campaign page when we have this option
available.

~~~
arghimonmobile
This is a pretty redundant comment, but I echo that sentiment! Slightly more
modest price tag and configuration and I'd snap one of these up in a
heartbeat.

------
akhilcacharya
I really wonder what sort of work you could do on this - most platforms don't
have Power8 support do they? So likely no frontend, obviously no mobile, most
tooling probably isn't available either...

~~~
shasheene
The less hip Linux distributions have very good support for the less popular
CPU architectures. For example, Debian Jessie has an official ppc64el (ie,
POWER8) release as well as mips and other platforms with low mindshare [1].

In my experience with Debian armhf of a ARM Chromebook (via crouton), all the
packages repositories all work out of the box and I haven't noticed any
issues. The only exception I've had has been (ironically) the Chromium browser
-- but that application is famously complicated to build.

The past few years I've been pleasantly surprised smoothly developing on
machines using different CPU architectures is with open-source software
(thanks to good automation (build bots), robust unit testing, and hard work by
Debian maintainers and their upstream developers)

Compared to the closed-source world of applications (application compatible
between Windows and Windows RT, or Apple's transition from PowerPC Macs to x86
Macs), being CPU architecture agnostic using purely open-source software
requires no effort at all. But being architecture agnostic using closed source
applications of course suffer from the same issues as the other platforms.

[1] [https://www.debian.org/ports/](https://www.debian.org/ports/)

