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Pet_Ant

> IBM is up to power 9 now, but I doubt if there are any personal motherboards for it.

The Talos II:

https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Talos_II

> EATX form factor > Two POWER9-compatible CPU sockets accepting 4-/8-/18- or 22-core Sforza CPUs

"Entry" level is $5,800 USD.

There won't be a POWER10 version from them because of proprietary bits required

https://www.talospace.com/2023/10/the-next-raptor-openpower-...

> POWER10, however, contained closed firmware for the off-chip OMI DRAM bridge and on-chip PPE I/O processor, which meant that the principled team at Raptor resolutely said no to building POWER10 workstations, even though they wanted to.

https://www.osnews.com/story/137555/ibm-hints-at-power11-hop...

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What are some of the reasons to buy or use these over Intel or AMD?

I bought mine - I own two Talos systems and a Blackbird - because I want choices in ISA, and if people want that, they'll need to spend the money. (It helps that I'm a notorious pro-PowerPC bigot, having used POWER since the RS/6000 MicroChannel days.) Other than ARM, they're the only architecture with both general OS support and processing power in the same ballpark, and while IBM may sometimes be dunderheaded, they aren't going anywhere, either.

They aren't cheap and they aren't for everyone. But it meets my needs and it puts my money where my mouth is.

If I understand you correctly it means the primary use case is security applications that need transparency at all levels on a system that is roughly equivalent to mainstream platform performance features. Is that accurate?

As I see it, these systems have two potential markets (some natural overlap exists): the first being people like me who don't want to necessarily feed the x86-64 beast if they can avoid it, and the second indeed being people who want a completely auditable, transparent platform. In both cases to be a practical alternative the computer needs to have similar performance to what you'd get from a modern desktop, and while POWER9 is no longer cutting edge, it still generally delivers.

If I could afford one I would, not because of security, but just the geek in me finds it cool.

Back in the 90s and early 2000s, there were several non-x86 architectures that were more powerful, and even 64 bit long before Intel ever did. The DEC alpha, SPARC, and others. I was also too poor to afford those back then but I remember them fondly.

> even 64 bit long before Intel ever did.

At some point I was reading e-mail on a 64-bit SGI machine while we waited for the Dell the company ordered for me to arrive.

The day it came in was one of the saddest days of my life.

I believe Intel and AMD motherboards all have proprietary firmware and the Talos systems are puritanically open. (But the processor itself is closed so there's that. Could have gone with SPARC Niagara which was open sourced https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/sun-open-sources-second-... )

> But the processor itself is closed

The microarch is closed and IBM-specific. However, the ISA is open and royalty-free, and the on-chip firmware is open source and you can build it yourself. In this sense it's at least as open as, say, many RISC-V implementations.

The Sun Niagara 2 even has the Verilog RTL available. That is several orders of magnitude more open than the IBM.

> Verilog RTL for OpenSPARC T2 design

> Verification environment for OpenSPARC T2

> Diagnostics tests for OpenSPARC T2

> Scripts and Sun internal tools needed to simulate the design and to do synthesis of the design

> Open source tools needed to simulate the design

https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc-t2-pag...

Unfortunately, going from there to an affordable chip with reasonable performance doesn't seem possible.

Well you could just buy a T2 chip, but I don't know that Sun would sell them outside of an entire system.

That's another difference: there are actually retail channels for new POWER9 chips. I bought at least one of mine that way.

You can certainly get Power cores with the VHDL and everything; the most notable of these is Microwatt, and IBM even maintains it. There are also A2O and A2I.

That said, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that a company that put R&D money into designing a high performance chip should give away the store. There has to be some incentive. I'm satisfied that I don't have any unexplained or opaque firmware blobs in my POWER9 chips and the ISA and its internal workings are well-documented. That was good enough for the FSF, and it's good enough for me.

I wouldn't mind a POWER10 machine not open-source from the ground up as the Talos machines. Cost/performance is a more important metric for me.

There is a deskside POWER10 machine from IBM, that uses their smaller half-rack server, but it has somewhat limited expansion capabilities.

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