To me the pros and cons here seem pretty predictable. As a developer, I’m actually most likely to buy one of these systems to address some of the issues mentioned.
It’d be interesting to read about practical situations where the machine had clear and concrete benefits over an x86 or Arm, and instances where it got in the way.
The machine or the architecture? (Disclaimer: POWER bigot going back to the original POWER1 and three Raptor systems in my personal possession.)
The architecture, it’s competitive, but all three have generally converged on the same ISA features. Power ISA is probably the least power efficient of the three, though this has been improving quickly now that perf/watt is a bigger selling point even at server scale.
The machine, no backdoors, fully auditable. Not even Coreboot with a gimped ME can say that.
The combination is the important part. There’s now a class of machines sold at retail that give you both user control down to the hardware and sufficient performance to make it practical. My Talos II is my daily driver, and I not only enjoy using it, I have confidence in it.
Mhm, I wonder why this is a surprise or even why it needs to be reported: any somewhat custom hardware will run into very similar problems. I guess they are just giving the facts at the end of the day?
This all lined up with what I expected (downsides: support, upsides: no ME), but what’s up with it taking 5-7 minutes to boot? That boot time is pegged in my head to “running linux via emulated MIPs on an 8-bit CPU”, not “everyday dev workstation”.
That’s including the time to bring up the BMC to the point at which main power can be applied to the processors, and that can be a good couple minutes all by itself from a cold start. Reducing this is the whole point of Kestrel, which is a simplified software BMC on a daughtercard.
Yes. It means that Netflix and Hulu prevent you from streaming on anything other than Windows, OSX, and mainstream Linux on mainstream hardware. Even chosing to use an insufficiently popular libc means you can’t load the DRM module.
Though they do bless some embedded solutions, like the roku boxes (which are linux arm boxes). You also can’t get full resolution except on such a box, presumably because of the stronger display snooping protections those boxes provide.
ECC does not prevent rowhammering.
To me the pros and cons here seem pretty predictable. As a developer, I’m actually most likely to buy one of these systems to address some of the issues mentioned.
It’d be interesting to read about practical situations where the machine had clear and concrete benefits over an x86 or Arm, and instances where it got in the way.
The machine or the architecture? (Disclaimer: POWER bigot going back to the original POWER1 and three Raptor systems in my personal possession.)
The architecture, it’s competitive, but all three have generally converged on the same ISA features. Power ISA is probably the least power efficient of the three, though this has been improving quickly now that perf/watt is a bigger selling point even at server scale.
The machine, no backdoors, fully auditable. Not even Coreboot with a gimped ME can say that.
The combination is the important part. There’s now a class of machines sold at retail that give you both user control down to the hardware and sufficient performance to make it practical. My Talos II is my daily driver, and I not only enjoy using it, I have confidence in it.
Mhm, I wonder why this is a surprise or even why it needs to be reported: any somewhat custom hardware will run into very similar problems. I guess they are just giving the facts at the end of the day?
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Yes, this is not the right place to discuss covid denialism.]
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: off-topic thread about covid denialism]
If anyone is interested, I have a Talos II that isn’t getting much use in my home - send me a message if you’d be interested in it.
Raptor doesn’t advertise this well IMHO, but they have a cloud service where you can try out their machines:
https://integricloud.com/ and their rates are here: https://secure.integricloud.com/content/base/managevms.html?viewrates=1
This all lined up with what I expected (downsides: support, upsides: no ME), but what’s up with it taking 5-7 minutes to boot? That boot time is pegged in my head to “running linux via emulated MIPs on an 8-bit CPU”, not “everyday dev workstation”.
That’s including the time to bring up the BMC to the point at which main power can be applied to the processors, and that can be a good couple minutes all by itself from a cold start. Reducing this is the whole point of Kestrel, which is a simplified software BMC on a daughtercard.
Does that mean that one can’t stream from a service like Netflix or Hulu using this motherboard?
Yes. It means that Netflix and Hulu prevent you from streaming on anything other than Windows, OSX, and mainstream Linux on mainstream hardware. Even chosing to use an insufficiently popular libc means you can’t load the DRM module.
… which is an utterly predictable outcome that was pointed out to the W3C while they were standardising EME. To no avail, sadly.
To make it super, super, clear: those Netflix and Hulu Web experiences are completely W3C standards compliant.
Though they do bless some embedded solutions, like the roku boxes (which are linux arm boxes). You also can’t get full resolution except on such a box, presumably because of the stronger display snooping protections those boxes provide.