Ask HN: What is the most powerful, fully open, fully programmable computer?

Re:Ask HN: What is the most powerful, fully open, fully prog... by johndoe0815 on Sunday August 06, 2023 @06:57PM (#37027825)

Perhaps the Talos-II Power 9-based systems. Unfortunately, these are rather expensive, systems start at around US$5k.

https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/

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Re:Ask HN: What is the most powerful, fully open, fully prog... by sph on Sunday August 06, 2023 @07:43PM (#37028172)

> "a price that won't break the bank"

5000 dollars. Geez, why the hell is this thing so expensive? Who is their target customer?

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Re:Ask HN: What is the most powerful, fully open, fully prog... by db48x on Sunday August 06, 2023 @08:32PM (#37028515)

The target customer is basically you. Someone who wants to get away from x86, have complete access to all of the firmware and microcode, but still have all the performance of a modern system.

The cost is high because it’s a niche product. IBM makes the CPUs for systems that they sell to enterprise customers (presumably at enterprise prices). Raptor made their own motherboards for them. Limited production runs mean higher production costs, plus you’re buying a whole pre–built system rather than individual parts to assemble yourself.

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Re:Ask HN: What is the most powerful, fully open, fully prog... by ralphc on Monday August 07, 2023 @11:35AM (#37035899)

Is this the descendant of PowerPC chips used in Macs? The last they used was a "G5", is this a "G9"?

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Re:Ask HN: What is the most powerful, fully open, fully prog... by johndoe0815 on Monday August 07, 2023 @03:31PM (#37039713)

Not in a direct line. The PowerPC was derived from IBM's Power chips (and chipsets) in the 1990s as a joint effort of Apple, IBM, and Motorola - for example, Motorola contributed the 88k bus interface (Apple had some working 88k-based prototypes) and low-power manufacturing experience and IBM streamlined the Power instruction set and created a single-chip implementation.

The first PowerPC chip was the PPC601 (G1) which was used in Apple's Powermac 6100/7100/8100 series as well as some of IBM's RS/6000 workstations (e.g. the 250) - later chips were PPC603/604 (G2), PPC750 (G3), PPC74xx (G4) and finally the PPC970 (G5). More on the early part of the PPC's history and also Linux on PPC can be found in my (German only, sorry) talk at the LinuxTag 1999. Amazingly, the slides are still online at https://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~linux/linuxtag99/linux_auf_po...

The Power9 chip in the Talos-II is derived from later Power chips which were used for later RS/6000 (p-Series) servers and workstations as well as some i-Series or AS/400 midrange computing systems.

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