Comment by cathartes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cathartes | Hacker News Reader

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As the articles mentions, this "AMD Libre Effort" isn't new--the Libreboot D16 was around before the Talos effort. I believe the D16 coreboot(/libreboot) work was also done by Raptor Engineering, which is the group presently pitching the Talos.

But I'll admit I presently have little faith these will take off. It seems like the folks who should know enough to care about these efforts don't. At least not enough to support them. HN articles like "I returned my 2016 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar" garner hundreds of upvotes and comments within hours of posting even weeks after this horse was beaten to an unrecognizable pulp on HN following the Apple announcement. And don't forget the hunt for a new "development laptop" (translation: a MacBook Pro-like laptop not made by Apple that somehow doesn't sacrifice any of the trendy/cool and usual dog tricks we've all grown accustomed to having in Apple's products) that also keeps coming up. Talos receives ... crickets chirping. What does this say about the state of our industry where even the tech literates of HN are barely distinguishable in their buying behaviour from the general consumer? It's almost like many of the folks here don't even see vendor lock-down as an actual problem, or at least don't give truly libre computing platforms more than a passing thought even when actual opportunities to produce them emerge.

> Talos receives ... crickets chirping.

5 grand for a CPU+Mobo no better than a USD400 Intel equivalent in performance with extremely higher energy requirements... unfortunately means dead before arrival. Specially with RISC-V being so promising.

Yes, hardware development is expensive, but most people aren't rich.

No, Talos is certainly not a cheap board, but I believe it was clearly intended by its developer to proverbially break ground for a new ecosystem that wasn't vendor-controlled--with increased adoption, these would undoubtedly get cheaper and better down the line.

While most people aren't rich, there is certainly enough wealth among the HN readership, as evidenced by their interest in Apple products, high-end smartphones, DSLRs, Teslas, etc. And even if people couldn't afford to get a workstation, they could have still donated to the cause. That this didn't happen says to me that enough people honestly just didn't give a damn. This comes off as very strange to me, because people are clearly outraged by the conduct of MS, Intel, and others. Buying a Talos means a chance to start stripping some of the usual antagonists in this saga of their hegemony on the computing community at large. Personally, I'd be willing to live with more expensive computers in the short-term if it meant a check on their influence in the long-term.

And performance-wise, Talos with an unclocked 8 core 190 watt POWER8 promised a bit better than the i7-5960X workstation I use at home (not a $400 chip), and consumed only modestly more power than same. So that doesn't strike me as a strong argument against it. But if the only reason this product would appeal to people is that it needed to offer equivalent performance to its x86 counterparts at roughly equiv prices, then we're in dire straits--that misses the entire point of having a computer that guarantees your access right down to the hardware and firmware. Until now, we've only enjoyed this luxury on small embedded boards (e.g., BeagleBone), which are toys in comparison.

Finally, RISC-V may be promising, but it's not here--POWER8 is, and POWER9 is already in the works. Why hold your breath for what may prove to be vaporware apart from prototypes in an academic or company R&D setting?

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