POWER9/TALOS II

[/dev/urandon]

Any of you guys pre-order the TALOS II motherboards or POWER9 CPUs? I've been waiting nearly a year for them: https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/

I'm really interested in running these as dedicated servers. I also want to build my next desktop using this CPU/Motherboard combo. So excited to see something that isn't x86 based coming back to the market. As much as I hated on Macs back in the day I was really sad to see them move over to x86 when they did because competition is always a good thing.

These are open source all the way down to the bare metal/firmware. With all the concerns about x86 lately (meltdown, management engines, tons of legacy hacks) it would be nice to have the option of using something else.

My dream system would be one of these with some type of x86 daughterboard for running older software on. I'm mainly interested in CPU intensive tasks like video encoding but some of my legacy software doesn't play nice in VM and requires an actual x86 CPU to function correctly.

 

[/dev/urandon]

These are finally starting to ship but I haven't gotten a chance to play with one yet. The CPUs are priced pretty low but the motherboards are still expensive. Still hoping it catches on in the general purpose market, more competition is always a good thing and it may finally cause Intel to do some real R&D for the first time in years. Also, POWER10 is expected to hit the market in the next two years or so. I'll probably wait until then to buy some new hardware because my current PC will last for some time before I need to upgrade.

I don't have a source handy at the moment but there are rumors that Apple is planning to move away from Intel soon. I'm wondering if they'll go back to IBM or if they'll stick to x86 and go with AMD. I'd love to see them go back to IBM because those pre-Intel Macs were really solid machines.

Anyone buy one of these yet?