The State of Owner-Controlled Computing as Talos Winds Down

Talos II is a followup to to their attempted crowd funding attempt of a POWER8 based "Talos Secure Workstation" last year, which did not meet its funding goal and failed. This article is a sort of post-mortem by them on why they thought it mattered and was still worth pursuing, and after the last 6 month's developments in x86 it seems worth a revisit (and perhaps some of the works exploring a tightening grip on general purpose computing by Cory Doctorow and such). They made some basic blunders in the launch of their crowd funding campaign, such as only offering a maxed out super expensive workstation at the start and adding still expensive, but much more sane options later. It's hard to say whether that would have actually made any significant difference given how far they were from their minimum target, but that sort of thing does sap momentum. Perhaps they've found a better angle with lessons learned (or the economics have improved since last year).

They claim Talos II will be open for pre-orders next month, so whether it ends up being vaporware may become at least somewhat clearer at that point (an actual preorder certainly isn't shipping, but it's more serious then a mere announcement or "coming someday" product page too). It's not as if POWER9 is generally available yet anyway.