[libre-riscv-dev] Who Buys Talos Workstations?

[Lauri Kasanen]

On Sun, 5 Apr 2020 01:52:47 +0000
"Immanuel, Yehowshua U" <yimmanuel3 at gatech.edu> wrote:

> I was looking at RaptorCS workstations and was pleasantly surprised to find that the entire system from MOBO to firmware is nearly entirely open source with exception of the ethernet card firmware and the CPU RTL of course.
>
> However, compared to their competitors which are equally performant i9s and threadripper systems, they are about twice as expensive. This makes me wonder, what are the primary PPC server customers in this market?

Well, first of all, people don't run i9s or threadrippers on servers.
Those are customer-class, customer-availability, no ECC, less RAM
accessible, etc. They run Xeons and Epycs, which are comparable to POWER
in price. (hobbyists not counted here, for home servers money tends to
come first)

Their customers tend to value openness and security (their own keys, not
the vendor's, for a truly secure boot; no ME backdoors). They may also
be using accelerators made for POWER's custom buses, faster than PCIe.

- Lauri