[coreboot] Owner-controlled POWER9 Talos II [was: Disabling Intel ME 11 via undocumented mode]

[Timothy Pearson]

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On 08/31/2017 03:23 AM, Merlin Büge wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Aug 2017 18:09:51 -0400
> "Taiidan at gmx.com" <Taiidan at gmx.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 08/30/2017 03:28 PM, Timothy Pearson wrote:
>>
>>>> POWER9 workstations are already coming on the market:
>>>>
>>>> https://raptorcs.com/TALOSII/
>>>>
>>>> Note that IBM selling similar machines directly would likely be
>>>> more expensive, not less, based on POWER8 price comparisons
>>>> between IBM and other vendors.  People purchase IBM branded
>>>> products for extreme reliability, not to get cheap equipment...
>> Damn that is sick as hell! you guys actually pulled it off! how did
>> you get the funding? how have I not heard about this before?
> 
> Yeah, I wonder why it was not announced on this list. Although not
> directly coreboot related, there probably is strong interest here
> within this community.
> 
> There is also a channel on freenode: #talos-workstation
> 
> From what I've heard, pre-orders will close very soon, and it's unknown
> if there will be a second production run of the boards...
> 
> Timothy, maybe you could shed some light on it?
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Merlin

Well, I didn't want to spam the list; that was the main reason for the
lack of a separate announcement here.  OpenPOWER systems don't have a
good reason to use coreboot versus the already open hostboot, and now
with DDR4 in use on the POWER9 a coreboot port is going to be even
harder than it would have been on POWER8.

That being said, since there does appear to be interest, I'll mention
that the Talos™ II pre-order system is largely driven by the fact that
the POWER9 CPU has not yet been officially released.  Raptor Computing
Systems is the first vendor on the market and the only vendor to be
shipping systems along with the first POWER9 CPUs scheduled for Q4 this
year.  Additionally, the Talos™ II retains unique features not found on
any other OpenPOWER machine, including the ability to self-host critical
programmable logic components.

Cost is far less than Talos I largely due to a higher level of
integration on the POWER9 CPU.  TDPs are far less than POWER8 (90W for
the bundled CPU) and we are confident that this machine is a worthy
replacement for x86 workstation systems that are not locked to
proprietary software.

There's an FAQ page here which also goes into more detail:

https://raptorcs.com/content/base/faq.html

On our current schedule preorders for shipment this year close the
middle of next month, so if you'd like to be among the first to have a
Talos™ II please get your pre-order in ASAP!

- -- 
Timothy Pearson
Raptor Engineering
+1 (415) 727-8645 (direct line)
+1 (512) 690-0200 (switchboard)
https://www.raptorengineering.com
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