Re:64-bit ARM desktop hardware?
by ashitlerferad on Monday July 25, 2016 @11:07AM
(#12159166)
Guess you are waiting for TALOS to be released? Bit too expensive though.
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 ?
Re:64-bit ARM desktop hardware?
by Gregordinary on Monday July 25, 2016 @02:20PM
(#12160486)
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.
Re:64-bit ARM desktop hardware?
by justincormack on Monday July 25, 2016 @05:35PM
(#12161774)
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.
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