[geeks] New POWER9 motherboard coming out...

[Jordan Geoghegan]

On 2/7/19 12:14 PM, Sandwich Maker wrote:
> " From: Nathan Raymond <nraymond at gmail.com>
> "
> " I hadn't heard about this:
> "
> " https://www.raptorcs.com/content/BK1B01/intro.html
> "
> " Intriguing! Nice to see new and very open designed motherboard come to
> " market more at consumer (~$800) prices. I didn't realize Raptor had gained
> " some traction with their previous designs, either... found these blog posts:
> "
> " http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-semi-review-of-raptor-talos-ii.html
> " http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-little-talos-of-your-very-own.html
> " http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-weekend-on-new-computer-or.html
> " http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/06/another-weekend-on-new-computer-or.html
> "
> " And looks like he's got this site too:
> "
> " https://www.talospace.com/
> "
> " Sure would be nice to have a viable alternative to x86 on the desktop.
>
> there's an active open-darwin community [cf. puredarwin.org] but sadly
> all their eyeballs seem to be trained on intel.
> ________________________________________________________________________

It sure would be nice if one of the *BSD communities were to make a port 
to Big Endian Power9 arch.

I believe FreeBSD was looking at a little endian port to Power9 but 
alas, I fear I may never again see a modern day browser or similar 
behemoth run on a big endian arch. x86 is a cancer, and I fear it may be 
terminal at this point. There needs to be diversity for any ecosystem to 
thrive, and ARM certainly isn't the answer. It breaks my heart that 
Oracle threw away SPARC. Oh how I yearn the days when nearly every ISP, 
telecom and datacenter ran their critical infrastructure on SPARC and/or 
Alpha.B  Don't even get me started on SGI and hppa and god forbid, PPC.