Talos II Lite | Hacker News Reader

Talos II Lite

secure.raptorcs.com

106 pointsrbanffy44 comments

Nice to see us getting closer to the long awaited day when you can "order up an ATX form factor POWER motherboard, throw it in a case, add some RAM and boot it up". BUT... man, the price. Wowzers... This is still a bit steep for a hobbyist or anybody operating outside a corporate setting.

Still, it's progress, so I'm not going to complain too much. And hopefully one day this catches on and as volumes scale up, the prices will start to drop.

The "AmigaOne A1222" should be considerably cheaper, once/if released. Mind it's only a "QorIQ P1022 32-bit e500v2" though, so a little bit different than the Power9 (server?) CPU.

Yeah, that’s a decent embedded CPU. I actually have quite a bit of experience with it (as well as the T2080, P1023, etc.).

I think it’s probably a little too weak to serve as a general desktop replacement though.

It’s somewhere in Raspberry Pi 3 territory in terms of actual CPU performance, but it’s a much more powerful SoC in general. It has GigE MACs, PCIe, SATA, etc.

It would make for a great router or NAS.

Also, even though they classify it as “QorIQ”, it’s really not like the other QorIQ chips. It doesn’t have the whole DPAA thing that chips like the T2080 do, which is honestly a good thing for the majority of use cases. The DPAA is overkill if you just need some Ethernet interfaces.

Open source firmware - nice! POWER9, supported by Linux - great! Not sure what the actual target customer base is, but the geek in me says I want it.

> Not sure what the actual target customer base is

The target customer is someone who doesn't want to be spied on by IME, PSP, or TrustZone, but totally trusts IBM not to collude with FVEY :)

If the firmware is open source, backdoors can only be present in the CPU itself. That is a posibility, however with Intel backdoors can be in so many more places, plus in the CPU itself. Sounds like an improvement?

Assuming people are actually auditing the open source firmware.

And the pre-installed firmware hasn't been modified at all.

Is it unreasonable to generally distrust all of the big companies from the USA when it comes to security-sensitive components like for example networking and CPU?

Why limit it to the USA? If anything the USA has the least misbehaven government among the nations where high performance chips are manufactured. I don't trust 'em wholesale, but I certainly don't trust the China any more, nor Russia, nor even Korea, Taiwan, or Japan (which I am partial to).

> Why limit it to the USA?

Threat modeling always considers the force your adversary is capable of bringing to bear against you.

If you are a US citizen, residing in the US, then the US is far more capable of capturing and throwing you into a 6'x6' steel box than the government of Russia or China.

Russia and China may very well be worse actors than FVEY, but if they can't actually get at you, then it's best to worry about who can.

They're doing 4U 24-disk rack servers. They're obviously positioning for secure storage, for one thing.

It's a fast, Windows-proof machine. What else can we ask for?

My biggest complain is that it looks too much like a PC by default. I remember the distinctive looks of the beige-and-purple Sun and always colorful SGI boxes.

But I totally understand why one would no go for a custom case when they are trying to make it less expensive. Heck... I may get one.

PC cases come in all kinds of shapes. You can get them shaped like yachts or the starship Enterprise. As long as it has enough space to fit the board in there anything goes.

You probably can't buy one from Dell or HP like that but look at the custom PC builder stuff.

True, but having a distinctive look is part of creating mind share. When you walk into a all-Apple office, you'll see very unique-looking laptops and desktops. That's part of what makes the brand valuable.

Raptor could derive some extra points from a unique enough case. Deepcool, Lian Li and Corsair (the ones I found in less than 5 minutes) sll make some that, with a change in highlight color to match Raptor's logo, would exude the aura of quiet power you want from a professional workstation and, hopefully, make people want to put it on top of the desk instead of hidden under it. ;-)

> My biggest complain is that it looks too much like a PC by default. I remember the distinctive looks of the beige-and-purple Sun and always colorful SGI boxes.

You could always spray-paint the case Indigo :)

Maybe that would suffice to give the machine a distinctive look. I remember the way the BeBox advertised the fact it had two CPUs by having two prominent LED bars indicating processor usage or how (now talking about supercomputing) the Connection Machines used LED matrixes to show activity.

Hopefully they will start selling just this motherboard, without the case and power supply. I assume the "Lite" version of the board is just the normal Talos II board but with parts to support the second CPU socket depopulated in order to reduce cost.

Many original complaints about the Talos system were its high price, it seems that Raptor really did listen as this new "Lite" offering is getting down into the "I could probably convince my manager to buy me one of these at work" kinds of pricing, assuming I had a genuine reason to be interested in it.

Raptor has indicated that they will sell the mainboard only, just not quite yet: https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/997421199117430784?...

(Disclosure: IBMer, I don't speak for IBM or Raptor)

2018, the year of AIX on the desktop :)

Oof, having been responsible for maintaining the building and upgrading of a bunch of open source software for a client years ago, this comment twisted my guts up something fierce.

Interesting! they are offering 22-cores Power9 chip for $2.5k each, that is significantly cheaper than a 22 cores Xeon (2696v4).

can't wait to see some benchmark results showing what you can get from a dual 22-cores Power9. too bad that Phoronix only has the results for the dual 8-cores setup.

For the lazy, recommended price of the Xeon is $4000-ish on ark.

And the Power9 is SMT4, so that's 88 threads instead of 44 !

I'd love to have a desktop like this, but I wonder how loud they are. I'd expect that POWER9 Heatsink/Fan assemblies are made more for data center use, where noise is an afterthought.

It's be awesome if they had heatsinks like this available for it: https://www.techpowerup.com/222984/noctua-unveils-prototype-.... I have something similar, and all I need is a slow 120mm fan to keep everything cool.

Issues with the EULA aside, this could virtualize at full speed Mac OS 9 and OSX/ppc vms, isn't that correct? Power 9 is a superset of the earlier ISA.

I don’t think ppc is compatible with power: it’s a derivative of an older version of the power architecture.

At the very least it should be much less of a leap to virtualize old PPC hardware on them, compared to doing the same on x86 or ARM.

This got me sufficiently interested I started poking around and looking at pricing ("Add to cart") of all the different systems available.

There are actually a few. In decreasing order of price:

- Both the 2U and 4U rackmount servers are $5,475 (4U: https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2SV2/purchase.html, 2U: https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2SV1/purchase.html). The only difference is 2 versus 3 SAS HBAs, 16 vs 24 drive bays, and 720W vs 1200W redundant PSUs, respectively. (The webpages are really easy to visually diff! I'll bet they did that on purpose.) Both come with two 18-core POWER9s, and 64GB RAM.

- The flagship Secure Workstation comes in next at $4,925 (https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/purchase.html). This ships with two 4-core POWER9s and 32GB.

- The "Desktop Development System" follows close behind at $4,375, and has one 4-core POWER9 and 16GB.

- There are also various motherboard-only options; the base option (no CPUs, no RAM) comes in at $2,325.

- Finally, the listed system comes in at $1,399. That's impressive.

The big caveat is that this price is motherboard-ONLY. Apparently you get an enclosure, but no CPU, and no RAM.

- A 4-core CPU is $375, (= $1,774)

- 8-core is $595, (= $1,994)

- 18-core is $1,375, (= just get a Talos II?)

- 22-core is $2,575. (= definitely just get a Talos II. And get two CPUs (= $5,510).)

As for RAM, the board uses DDR4; I do not know enough to say if it "must" be ECC. I'll assume it does (I vaguely recall reading somewhere that using the wrong kind of RAM (even if it will fit in the socket) can fry things sometimes, don't know if it applies here). Talos doesn't SKU discrete RAM, so there's that as well. (32GB seems to float at around US$250-$300 or so; Google's giving me AUD$550-$600, AU pricing is always all kinds of crazy.)

The final catch (noted in the footnotes at the bottom) is that the Talos II Lite cannot be upgraded to dual CPUs. Huh!

The Users' Guide linked on the product info page is for a "T2P9D01" motherboard (using a direct link, but I found the info page for the PDF at https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/File:T2P9D01_users_guide_vers...). The oldest version of this file is from 16 April - so it's fairly new - however page 1 of the PDF shows a motherboard with 2 CPU sockets.

If "cannot" is truly literal (and it seems so - I can't see Raptor Engineering ever using a "buy an unlock code to enable socket 2" approach), well, hopefully they're just using existing boards but not soldering in a bunch of components. (Just because wasting the electronics would be sad, no other reason.)

Maybe someone knows more about this new board (? / configuration).

---

I cannot do a comment like this without...

- Talos™ II Secure Workstation

- 2x 22-core POWER9 CPU

- "Second POWER9 Processor with HSF" - I have no idea what this does but it sounds very useful

- 128GB ECC DDR4

- 500GB NVMe

Total: $13,825

---

A datacenter should start stocking this hardware and making it publicly available.

Because all models of the POWER9 have hardware virtualization. Making a fleet of POWER9 KVM VPS blades is totally feasible by just buying these systems. (I say that because I'm not aware of anywhere else you can get a POWER9 box - and a secure one, what's more.)

So, I'm wondering... if someone went and...

- Talos™ II 4U Rack Mount Server

- 2x 22-core POWER9 CPU

- The 2nd-processor HSF thingy

- 1TB RAM

- 500GB NVMe

Total: $23,475

...how many VMs would they be able to viably run per host/node? On 1TB of RAM. Envisaging a, uh, economically-optimized "high RAM, low CPU" scenario where the hosts are packed kinda tight.

FWIW, Contabo offers a configuration a bit like that (of course on x86), where you can get 6GB of RAM for like ~$10/mo. Compiling Chrome took over 10 hours, but pretty much everything else I threw at it back when I had it didn't choke that badly.

POWER9 VPS offerings have come and gone. It'd be nice (and fun) for someone independent to offer a small number of nodes.

---

I just discovered that Raptor seems to offer https://integricloud.com/. Seems kinda interesting; reading https://integricloud.com/content/base/faq.html, it's obvious they have the right idea about security.

I'm a bit perplexed at the red text at https://integricloud.com/content/base/software.html:

> NOTE: The source packages required to build reproducible versions of our node firmware and software stack are only available to active users of the IntegriCloud™ platform, auditors for active users of the IntegriCloud™ platform, and security researchers.

Security through obscurity much? :/

I don't quite understand the rationale here.

> If "cannot" is truly literal (and it seems so - I can't see Raptor Engineering ever using a "buy an unlock code to enable socket 2" approach)

My understanding is that the Lite board is essentially the full board, but with the second socket and related components removed from the design to reduce cost.

> I'm not aware of anywhere else you can get a POWER9 box

Raptor is the only company selling Power in a workstation form factor, and of course they've got the lowest entry price.

IBM has the AC922 (https://www.ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/power-systems-ac922) and will be rolling out more models imminently.

Several OpenPOWER members (https://openpowerfoundation.org/) are also working on their own POWER9 machines. AFAIK, none of them have GAed just yet, but some of the machines were announced at the OpenPOWER summit - https://openpowerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/H.... There are quite a number of POWER8 machines already on the market.

All POWER9 machines use a primarily open source firmware stack, though it does depend on the vendor - vendors will have their own customisations in some cases, and in particular for the BMC firmware. Raptor is also stripping out/manually rebuilding some binary blobs etc.

(Disclosure: IBMer, I don't speak for IBM or Raptor.)

> Raptor is the only company selling Power in a workstation form factor, and of course they've got the lowest entry price.

Not sure if the AmigaOne X5000 board counts, but it might be worth looking here: http://amigakit.amiga.store/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=3... - the motherboard is also available alone.

Right, I should clarify that when I said Power I really meant Power of the "Book 3S" variety (ie IBM server chips) rather than the embedded/QorIQ kind. Though I'm still very happy to see people selling and using PPC in all its forms :)

HSF = Heatsink+Fan

WARNING / NOTICE / APOLOGY re pricing glitch/omission

I was tired when I wrote the above. While re-scanning my submitted posts for replies I just realized I made a major error/omission. (Fresh eyes when rereading, and all that. I realized of my own accord, FWIW.)

Each system has a base price listed at the top of the purchase page. This adds up to a total at the bottom of the list, which doesn't show on my screen without scrolling.

The prices in my previous post are the base price, not the total price. IOW, I was listing the motherboard/case/et al, and no CPU or RAM.

I MEANT to clarify this - that I was listing the base price, not the configured total - and I also remember intending to mention my curiosity as to why the base price was different for each system. I'd figured it was because it represented sundry costs such as enclosure/motherboard/etc. But I got distracted with playing with the pricing calculator and completely forgot to add this point! My apologies.

TL;DR, this means the systems are base price + cost for RAM and CPU. The "default" pricing for each system is:

- Talos II: $7,010

- 2U: $9,995

- 4U: $10,345

- Desktop Development System: $5,120

- Talos II Lite: $1,399 (no options, including CPU and RAM, are configured by default)

Okay, this is cost-effective. I really like this, although I'm not in the market for one.

Ignore the 4-core and 8-core options. But they seem to exist as a potential cheap option to draw in some eyes (maybe??). But they're not worth it IMO.

But the 18-core Power9 intrigues me and seems very well priced. Threadripper 1950x is 16-cores / quad-memory channel for $900 (sometimes $699), but is way "smaller" than Power9 18-core / 72 threads. And holy moly, is that 10MB L3 cache per pair of chips??

So really, the 18-core Power9 compares favorably to the 24-core / 48-thread 7401P EPYC (8-channel RAM / 64 PCIe lanes).

Intel's 14-core i9-7940x is straight up inferior (similar to Threadripper). 4x channel RAM and way smaller core-counts. Xeon Gold 6150 is comparable but is lol-wut $3200 per chip.

-------------

If we're looking at a system of total-costs of ~$5k to ~$10k (depending on RAM / SSDs), then Power9 Talos II Lite actually looks like an extremely good option.

Only AMD's EPYC 7401p has similar price/performance, but the Power9 is a better designed chip with regards to inter-process communication and highly-threaded tasks. EPYC 7401p is a quad-NUMA design on a single socket, with relatively slow interprocess threads.

EPYC 7401p is great for lots of "server-like" tasks: web server, render farms, compile-box, and the like. But Power9's superior thread-communication architecture means you get both high-cores and high-interprocess communication. No infinity fabric or NUMA nodes slowing you down.

This seems like an incredibly good deal in my book. At least, if I was in the market for $5000 to $10,000 computers. If you're running a singular big application that needs superior inter-process communications, only Power9 or Xeon's mesh will do. Xeon is 3x more expensive, while EPYC has those infinity fabric slowdown issue (although EPYC is still cheaper).

EDIT: I double-checked the Power9 architecture and it seems like its very similar to AMD's Zen design. There are 2-cores per unit, and those cores share a 10MB L3 cache (instead of AMD's 4-cores per CCX sharing 2MB L3 cache). So I guess my assertion about "superior threading" requires more discussion (Afterall, IBM's "internal fabric" looks very similar to AMD's infinity fabric)

EDIT: Power's architecture / ISA has one advantage: and that is it has a looser interpretation of "cache coherency" than AMD / Intel. So the caches are more free to operate more independently. Optimal Power9 coding under this "looser" definition requires mastery of C / C++'s memory_order_consume mechanics (lol @ all 5 people in the world who know how to use those). But Acquire / Release semantics will still be faster on Power9 than on Intel/AMD, due to the looser definition of "cache coherency" on Power9 systems.

So I'd imagine (although this assumption is untested), that Power9 has superior multithreaded performance. Assuming proper use of relaxed / acquire / release / consume mechanics, which can speed up inter-thread communications on Power9 systems.

Of course, if you have bad programmers who use "global locks" or whatever, Power9 communications would not be able to operate very quickly under those circumstances. You'd likely need to really take advantage of those memory-consistency flags in C++.

> (lol @ all 5 people in the world who know how to use those)

Red 1 of 5 here, standing by...

newbie to Power 9 here. i'm just wondering what one can do with this type of machine better than an intel. i presently have the dell precision with up to 2 procs (currently have 1), am planning to gain more insight into machine learning.

TIA

I think the biggest advantage of this particular system is openness. As the linked page says, you can modify any piece of code in the system, including CPU microcode. That means no secret operating system running somewhere you can't touch (i.e. Intel Management Engine), and no opaque blobs that could be doing anything.

> i'm just wondering what one can do with this type of machine better than an intel.

The BIG advantage to Power9 is the massive L3 cache. Utterly, utterly huge. The 18-core Power9 chip has 90MB of L3 for example. With 8x RAM channels at only $1300. With 4xSMT, that's 72-threads.

Compare to Intel's Xeon Gold 6150 $3000 chip, which only has 24.75 MB of RAM and only 6x RAM channels. Intel only supports 2xSMT for 36-threads.

What workloads are people going to run on this?

I'm interested in simply porting software to this. The lowest-spec model will still run a compiler, which is mostly what I want.

As far as production applications go, Google seems to have found at least one: https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2018/03/19/head...

TLDR; $2k for a 8-core POWER9 system.

Without RAM :/

But the page comes with 15 ™ signs.

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