Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

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I've felt this same frustration with POWER for what feels like forever. I'd love to build and run a POWER desktop system, but traditionally there hasn't been a readily available, standard form-factor, somewhat inexpensive motherboard that you could just order up from Tyan or whoever. On and off over the years there's been a lot of talk about how this company or that was going to build a standard ATX motherboard for POWER cpu's, but they seem to never materialize, or if they do, they're insanely expensive, or something which keeps the whole idea just out of reach.

This most recent push for openness in the POWER world might actually change that though. Tyan does have a kinda-sorta not-too-expensive POWER8 based server available, and there was a document floating around a while back listing all the companies who were committing to build machines, motherboards, etc. based on POWER8. As I recall, there were a lot of names on the list, which is encouraging.

But still... why can't we hit up NewEgg and order an ATX motherboard, a CPU and some RAM for, say, $1000.00 or less? sigh

Guess you are waiting for TALOS to be released? Bit too expensive though.

https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php

Yeah, I like the idea behind TALOS, but nearly $4k for just the motherboard and CPU??? That's a bit much for me to swallow. :-(

I agree that 4K is a tough pill to swallow, hopefully something like this eventually goes down to the ~2K price range, I could probably jump on it then.

If people don't help support it at $4k, it will never reach $2k.

The issue is at 4K I might as well buy a "proper" POWER server from IBM (like the S812LC) for the same price since I don't need a "workstation" form-factor (I've already got some rackmount equipment at home, and my current development system is just a Fedora VM running on my home server).

The S812LC is designed, and made, by Tyan.

http://www.tyan.com/campaign/openpower/

If by 'proper' power system you mean IBM Pseries, this is not it.

That's not that much actually. Look at Thinkpad P70 or other Xeon-based high-end workstation.

It is possible to know how far they are into having enough pre-order ?

While not an ATX Desktop board, there is an initiative to make a POWER-based notebook: http://www.powerpc-notebook.org/en/

I think nintendo wii has a power cpu and you can run linux on it !

The big limitation is that you only get 96MB of RAM. But still, it's a pretty reasonable choice if you want a big-endian test system on the cheap.

Pretty much all ARM boards will run big endian, although not sure Linux has armeb distros much (NetBSD works).

Nice... I had no idea you could run Linux on the Wii.

There's only ~100MB of RAM so it's a bit ascetic. You're better off running an old PowerPC Mac with Linux as that'll give you better but nearly equivalent hardware.

What about the Gamecube? Might even be a cheaper option.

It has been done before (http://www.gc-linux.org/wiki/Main_Page), but the simplicity of jailbreaking the Wii, plus its ability to connect to the Internet, make it much more viable for anything more than a simple project.

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