Talos Secure Workstation
crowdsupply.com
crowdsupply.com
AFAIK there are only a handful of very specific chips that you can currently get away with not using vendor tools against, like ICE40s.
I would be willing to put a fair amount of money into crowdfunding for better open source -full- toolchains for FPGAs (especially something targeting Xilinx devices). The vendor tools, aside from being closed source, are all huge bloated disasterpieces, and none available for macOS.
The problem with open toolchains from the manufacturer's point of view is that they have nothing to gain and everything to lose. They don't want to sell chips one at a time to hobbyists. They want to sell them millions at the time to GM and other companies. In their mind, open toolchains buy them nothing but leave them open to competitors stealing their designs. I'm not saying this view is accurate, it is just how chip vendors think.
[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-systems/power8-...
As mentioned on a different comment, we are investigating adding a lower-spec machine to the lineup due to popular demand. We had not anticipated the level of demand for a pre-built workstation with a less powerful configuration.
Most likely, this new configuration would scale the RAM down and replace the high-end workstation GPU with a mid-range consumer card. More information will be posted to the campaign page when we have this option available.
The key here is all open. From mass storage to memory to boot you can "own" the entire system. There is no way to build that at any where close to this price with existing x86 machines. Just negotiating the NDA alone to have access to the TCM area of the chip would probably be $50K in lawyers fees.
That said, I had the same thought at you, $18K ? Really? Who are they kidding? And then I thought about my PC purchases over the last 12 years. I've spent about that much (granted I did so by upgrading and replacing systems every 2 - 3 years) But my last system is now 4 years old and frankly not really in that much need of replacing.
Personally I think IBM should fund this and order 200 work stations for one of its engineering teams. Get their feedback on it. Would be an interesting experiment for them.
$4,100 for the motherboard, add $1,135 for the slowest CPU and your minimum buy-in is $5,235 or $7,450 for the top-end 12-core (we can assume that RAM, GPU, Storage costs are the same as any other system)
But Talos is expensive as it uses a custom board, with custom open-source firmware at relatively low volume, so a more affordable Talos desktop is probably infeasible.
I guess for that it needs to be a desktop (not a workstation) -- so a much more stripped down system dropping expensive components such as the FPGAs that a secure internet connected server, or a typical software engineer's desktop don't need.
In other IBM POWER news, Google has recently announced it's Open Compute Project POWER9 server -- the Zaius P9 Server: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709995
Edit: If the VM provided is anemically underpowered, the platform will be little more than a curiosity for me.
Initial targets were a dual core VM with 2GB RAM and 10GB storage. Would you consider this underpowered or acceptable?
Edit: In terms of CPU and RAM, this is comparable (in the sense they can be compared) to a $20/month VM at Digital Ocean.
As far as strorage, have you considered using standard drives in addition to enterprise SAS drives?
Are you trying to go mainstream with the platform as quickly as possible, or just trying to carve out a niche for now?
We see this first run as targeting more niche and corporate / government type use cases, however (should funding be met) subsequent runs after this first one may be targeted more at a mainstream audience. It's far too early to tell at this stage.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-systems/power8-...
The price range is $1,135-$3,350.
Though I'd choose the mainboard only + CPU and add an old, passive GPU for price reasons
If you can't afford the mainboard or a full system, please pledge some money for user freedom.
I really want to see this project succeed. I am leaning toward buying just the motherboard and CPU. I prefer SSDs, and don't need massive storage anyway.
Interestingly, some Asus and GIGABYTE motherboards for AMD and/or Intel processors support Libreboot:
https://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/
So in theory, if this campaign succeeds, it may catch their attention, and we may have more affordable options down the road.
That's why we need companies like Raptor Engineering! Vote with your money...
That sounds interesting, but could you elaborate? The comparisons to comparable Intel systems I've seen did not seem to suggest anything like that, it was more like sometimes Power wins, sometimes x86 does and both are quite similar performance wise. What kind of tasks did you observe to perform well?
And on a practical level we know that people who bleat about firmware blobs are not going to spend $6,000 to escape from them.
The lesser expensive servers do not use the same firmware as Talos™ or even the more expensive IBM systems. The cheaper machines reduce cost by using proprietary firmware components wherever possible, and by dropping as many features as the market will bear at the lower price point. This is not the market segment that Talos™ is aimed at.
That presentation offers several potential explainations for why that particular market segment is locked to proprietary, non-libre offerings only.
Given the strong and consistent feedback on this we are looking at adding a more minimal pre-assembled option. Most likely this would involve scaling the RAM count down and dropping the GPU to a mid-range consumer card. More information will be posted to the campaign page when we have this option available.
In my experience with Debian armhf of a ARM Chromebook (via crouton), all the packages repositories all work out of the box and I haven't noticed any issues. The only exception I've had has been (ironically) the Chromium browser -- but that application is famously complicated to build.
The past few years I've been pleasantly surprised smoothly developing on machines using different CPU architectures is with open-source software (thanks to good automation (build bots), robust unit testing, and hard work by Debian maintainers and their upstream developers)
Compared to the closed-source world of applications (application compatible between Windows and Windows RT, or Apple's transition from PowerPC Macs to x86 Macs), being CPU architecture agnostic using purely open-source software requires no effort at all. But being architecture agnostic using closed source applications of course suffer from the same issues as the other platforms.