I also have a Blackbird, and haven't had any issues with getting precompiled software or compiling software for it. What issues have you had?
I find it more performant than the kind of ARM hardware I think you're referring to, and more satisfying to use. I'd probably buy it again if mine died.
* Firefox didn't have a Javascript JIT. That made using Grafana, GCP Console, etc, basically impossible in my browser of choice.
* Closed source Electron applications (Teams, Slack, etc) weren't able to run natively, and the browser solution worked poorly for me.
* I was using Void Linux PPC, a one-man fork of Void Linux. I decided that the bus factor was too high, and since I wasn't willing to switch distributions, I had to switch back to x86_64. This proved to be a good decision, because shortly after I switched, the maintainer of Void Linux PPC announced that he was stopping maintenance to work on Chimera Linux.
There were other little things that accumulated to create enough mental pressure to abandon it as a daily driver. It's fantastically neat hardware, and in my experience utterly reliable. I can't think of a single machine crash I had in the entire three years I used it daily. It can and does work well for plenty of people - it just wasn't quite right for me.
If you're not used to buying server-grade hardware, I know it seems expensive. I think the founder initially priced it too low in an effort to make it as affordable as possible, found himself giving tons of expensive support, and decided to raise prices to the market average.
I don't follow: how are they not server grade? How are they crippled Power9s? What x86 server are you comparing them to?
For example, the Talos II system has dual (server) CPU sockets with up to 24 cores/96 threads per processor; 16 ECC memory slots with 2TB capacity; SAS controller; out of band management and service processor (separate serial and ethernet ports for the BMC); a server form factor; better capacitors; no onboard audio and only rudimentary graphics; and a thick/quality PCB. It's also made in America. What else were you looking for?
If you're used to building your PCs, you can build an 8-core workstation with a bunch more RAM for about $4000. While it's about double what you might spend on a similarly capable commodity desktop, you're getting a Libre boot process, fewer blobs, and a different class of chips.
I care! And I know a lot of people who care, but we are still a niche sized group. I care mainly because of Raptor Computing Systems offerings, which I think are the main (only?) OpenPOWER systems available. I use a Blackbird, and I'm happy with it.
From my own point of view, I'm willing to spend a $$$$ premium on hardware where I can have assurances that from the time I boot it, only code I authorize to run is run. Where every part of the system has code that, at least in principle, I or someone else could audit and fix. People have valuable IP stored on computers and it's worth much more than a few thousand dollars.
If you just look at price to performance, you are missing the point. Also, the price is not out of line with other niche desktops such as Apple's or System76.
There's not a lot of competition in this niche. The previous system that was useful was a ASUS KGPE-D16 motherboard, which could be librebooted (https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/kgpe-d16.html) I expect something new to come along in this space every 5-10 years.
For my purposes, I haven't fought with the software ecosystem, and was able to compile the very few packages that weren't already precompiled.
Here are some developments I think are worth noting:
* There is a libre driver for the onboard NIC. (https://github.com/meklort/bcm5719-fw) This seems to be the only project that cares about blobs in every part of the board.
* Artic Tern, (https://www.raptorcs.com/content/AT1PC2/intro.html) which is objectively still mostly a development platform (that if you're skilled you can get to work) provides a completely libre boot environment and the possibility of controlling other peripherals using only auditable code.
* I'm not aware of a lot of hardware that would take advantage of IBM CAPI 2.0 IO accelleration. Perhaps someone has some information on this.
* I'm not sure what the status of transactional memory is, but I'm not aware of it being used in software. Perhaps someone can enlighten me on this.
These would be nice to have, and I hope to have them in the future.
The bottom line is that this is the only hardware currently in production that is going in the direction promised by the personal computing revolution back in the 1970s and 80s and is still capable of handling most people's current general computing needs. I write this hoping that other people like me who are reading this understand the importance of keeping hardware like this alive.
>The bottom line is that this is the only hardware currently in production that is going in the direction promised by the personal computing revolution back in the 1970s and 80s and is still capable of handling most people's current general computing needs. I write this hoping that other people like me who are reading this understand the importance of keeping hardware like this alive.
this is what I believe as well, too many people on HN seem to be lose grasp of the big picture in favor of a few dollars today. (but the big picture can only go so far i.e. Keynes's "In the long run we are all dead"). BUT the big issue that I fear many people are overlooking is the post-PC era. I made a thread on g the other day but didn't get much traction there
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-PC_era
I believe home computing will become more expensive and progress slows down as traditional businesses and "gamers" that currently fuel that affordability dry up and economies of scale inverts. Things like Talos and OpenPOWER will remain more stable in my opinion as they already priced in these niche market demands unlike other archs that seem to depend on a big net of users that every day is growing smaller as people migrate to cloud only solutions. I think it's advantageous to invest into OpenPOWER as an eccosystem even if RISC-V picks up since there's already big dollars behind it that doesn't depend on scraping the bottom of the barrel for funding. I plan to write this up with actual numbers some other day, maybe estimate a sort of timeline when this might start happening
Interesting take! I hadn't considered that there could be an inversion where suddenly desktops are no longer commodity products.
It got me thinking--something similar happened to digital cameras where all the cheap point and shoots were replaced by phones so that now standalone cameras are an expensive niche for photographers.
OpenPOWER piggybacks off of IBM's high end POWER offerings, which are themselves part of a big enterprise market for scientific and financial computing. The OpenPOWER derivatives use IBM's POWER 8/9 chips.
I started looking for an alternative to commodity desktops when news came out that there were ring 0/-1/-2/-3 vulnerabilities in chips and I realized I had no idea what code was running on my computer. A lot of people just applied the mitigations and shrugged like it was perfectly normal that they couldn't really control their own computers.
When Raptor came out with their offerings, I thought it was great: full ownership of my computer, and as an added bonus some premium IBM chips from another architecture. I know people who spend more than I spent just on graphics cards every year.
>It got me thinking--something similar happened to digital cameras where all the cheap point and shoots were replaced by phones so that now standalone cameras are an expensive niche for photographers.
exactly, I think it'll be better now to settle in with OpenPOWER rather than later to not get caught off guard. This whole affordable PC era was a temporary illusion and we can't relie on vendors providing us mitigations since even those eventually cease. Personally I still can't afford a Raptor machine atm but I'm getting in by working on stuff in QEMU with the recommended openPOWER debian release
I find it more performant than the kind of ARM hardware I think you're referring to, and more satisfying to use. I'd probably buy it again if mine died.