@HopelessDemigod well, DM&P does pull off legacy designs in embedded and Industrial with their #Vortex86 series going down to #i486SX.

• Obviously if they didn't sell passively-cooled SOMs on older structural widths, they could in theory kick this beyond 4 GHz.

It's just that there are very few workloads that need absurdly-fast, single-threaded performance* and ain't designed for #POWER9 / #OpenPOWER or #s390x / #zArchitecture mainframes.

• Like it's cheaper to just get an #embedded multicore with like 4x1,5GHz that maxes out at 15W and can be confogured down to 4W and will be overall more responsive and faster in any other workload.

And the few workloads that ain't multithreaded may be coaxed into it with like #vmware #ESXi mashing together multiple hardware threads into one superfast single thread, but I'd say that the vestigal compatibility of like an i7-6700K should potentially work fine, and worst-case one just setsit up to only use 1C/1T and constantly turbo-boost @ 91W TDP…

I can sell a blackbird computer for $3,000 (with a used power9 CPU). You'll pay $6,000, if you buy from raptorcs.com. Anyone interested in buying it?

#power9 #raptorcomputing

Com Ports on a Power9 Computer

https://video.hardlimit.com/w/qYa49Z84LTFf7euRRXeoAU

How hard would it be to take the desktop blackbird computer and turn it into a laptop? Is there a reason that I shouldn't try to do this? Looks like the motherboard alone would cost $2,268, but ebay is currently selling some used power9 CPUs for $25.

#raptorcomputing #blackbird #power9 #openhardware

Replaced a bitrotted flash chip in my #talosII motherboard today.
PNOR flash is somewhat sensitive apparently for power fluctuations and static.

I can boot unattended again! #power9

Finally, the separate box of POWER9 upgrades appears. These are for the dual socket 144 thread Talos II here at home (the LC-922 are in colo). Relocation has turned up a lot of missing hardware, very pleased about this turn of events.

So, the long lost box contains:
- 4x Samsung 883-DCT 2TB SSDs for local storage ZFS pool (with 2x Optane NVMe cache)
- 3x PM863a 240GB SSDs for the OS
- always more RAM
- an OcuLink 4x to U.2 cable w/ Optane drive floating around somewhere
- Mellanox 50GbE QSFP28 NIC for RDMA fun

@dexter finally, we can continue the project with appropriate hardware

#homelab #power9 #ibm #freebsd #goodmorning #unpacking #servers #hardware #happiness

💻 Hello Old Friend, Talos II 💻

This was my first IBM POWER9 system, acquired in 2020 and built for home/desk use. Dual socket SMT4 Sforza, 144 threads, 256-512GB RAM, various storage/net/accelerators over the years. [1]

As expected, I fell in love and acquired four IBM Power System L922-2U [2], which are presently in the colo awaiting network rebuild (remote hands this time).

The Talos II has served a variety of purposes, with most of its time running FreeBSD PPC64le (&a bit of PPC64be for fun). Sometimes also Linux, back when I was tearing into qemu code for compiler optimization hypothesis testing, RTX GPU passthrough, +validating assumptions about qemu on P9/le handling amd64 & arm64 emulation.

So, out of storage! Into the rack! New user accounts! But first it needs updated OS drives (the 3x 64GB SATADOM in Raid-Z1 need to be repurposed), and a NIC (25G-DP CX-5 or X710-DA4).

- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER9#Raptor_Computing_Systems_/_Raptor_Engineering
- [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER9#IBM

@dexter electricity comes next 🧠

#FreeBSD #Linux #POWER9 #PPC64le #IBM #RaptorTalos #FMT2 #colo #datacenter #onprem #homelab #hardware #engineering #goodtimes #sunday #meditation #whiteNoiseGeneratorsLulMeToSleep #WomenInTech #WomenInSTEM