[Beowulf] If I were specifying a new custer...

[Gerald Henriksen]

On Wed, 17 Oct 2018 16:35:52 +1100, you wrote:

>On Saturday, 13 October 2018 12:38:15 AM AEDT Gerald Henriksen wrote:
>
>> If ARM, or Power, want to move from their current positions in the
>> market they really need to provide affordable developer machines,
>
>Not sure if this comes in at a price point that makes sense for this, but 
>there is now an ATX Power9 mainboard available.
>
>https://raptorcs.com/TALOSIILITE/
>
>They claim:
>
>https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/1020371675316215809
>
># TalosIILite in stock and ready to ship! #POWER9 mainboard + CPU + RAM + HSF
># for under $2,000 USD, what's not to like? Supports all of our Sforza CPU
># options, from 4 core to the high end 22 core CPUs.

Not really.

While there obviously is a lot of corporate funded work in the open
source community I would guess little of it is interested in anything
but the traditional AMD/Intel systems, and maybe ARM.

To give a new / minor platform traction you really need to have
something priced where it can be a personal purchase, normally as a
secondary machine as few people will move to ARM or Power (at this
point) as an only machine.

They do however have another platform coming, no prices yet, but
should hopefully be more affordable in the Blackbird:

https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Blackbird

And to point out what is obvious to many, the reason these cheaper
systems are needed is to get all that open source software working and
tested, Raptor has had to do work just to get Chrome working on Power:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raptor-Chrome-JIT-PPC64LE-Work