Talos II is pretty interesting now

[pylkko]

RISC-V is a royalty-free open ISA, and there are billions of RISC-V cores now existing in the world. The vast majority of them are microcontrollers with a few kb of RAM used by companies that nead control electronics for computer hardware, cameras and such. Last year SiFive released the worlds first RISC-V computer that can run Linux, and I was sure that this field would develop further. However, it appears to have died, I have heard of only new designs (on paper) of future cores, no new implementations.

Now IBM's Power ISA is also open and royalty-free. But the Talos board is also now certified by the FSF as entirely free of closed-source software. It can be used with Debian on open source firmware. The only thing is the price, because mainboard alone costs as much as the SiFive board, which has integrated RAM and everything else needed to run. However, here you have a computer that you could buy once and use for the rest of your life, no vendor-lock in and planned obsolecence, on difficulties in repurposing as everything can be changedand tweaked by the user. I wonder if anyone of you guys have one?

https://www.fsf.org/news/talos-ii-mainb ... ur-freedom

[CwF]

Wow, looks like a supermicro dressed to kill. Really, if those prices are full retail, they fit right in.

[sunrat]

Interesting indeed but a little over my price range. Keen to see reports on how it runs with Debian.

[stevepusser]

"Use the rest of my life?" What will that look like in twenty years when everyone else's computers are embedded in their clothes and invisible? I'll look like someone staggering around with an ear trumpet!

[pylkko]

"Use the rest of my life?" What will that look like in twenty years when everyone else's computers are embedded in their clothes and invisible? I'll look like someone staggering around with an ear trumpet!

I hear you, but that will happen anyway... haha.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I wonder if anyone of you guys have one?

Not yet but here's a blog post about getting Linux running on one of their Blackbird motherboards:

https://www.talospace.com/2019/06/a-sem ... kbird.html

So it's not exactly a Xeon replacement yet and the open-source firmware isn't that good compared to the blobs IBM are running in their server farms.

[pylkko]

Thanks for the link. This is what I suspected. Firstly, you cannot use any kind of GPU, because they don't exist with open source frimware and drivers. Second, the price about doubles when you include all the external devices needed to run. But that is not so bad... not nice, but not so bad either.

[pendrachken]

$4K+ for a bottom of the barrel base model processor from 2017? Holy shit, finally someone more insane than Apple to throw money at! Sign me up!


Not to mention, that $4K is for a SINGLE processor on a dual CPU board, with only 16GB RAM included... No. No thanks. Unless the damn thing can cook and clean for you it's just over priced crap, no matter how "free" it is.

[pylkko]

Yes, but that it is expensive is common knowledge, as is the fact that it is not as expensive as it was previous to the Lite model...

Everyone is expecting the prices to go down with all of these new devicves based on rarer architectures

Also the guy says the grand total he put down for the parts was 2071 USD...

Also, who cares what year the model is? Why not rather focus on benchmarks?