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Right now you can buy the Talos II motherboard (or a complete prebuilt system) from Raptor Engineering, and along with it you can have a single or dual processor setup of up to 22 cores each with 4 way SMT (essentially hyperthreading). It's still early days but I hear it's competitive with x86_64 at certain things and runs Gentoo well.

As a bonus most of the firmware of the components on the board are open source as well, and just a git clone away.

(Not sponsored by them, but I've considered such a system for myself)




It's not competitive at all at performance. Phoronix did a review a few days ago. Am on mobile now but will look for it and edit this post.

* https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rome-pow...


From the article: “The Talos II server with dual IBM POWER9 22-core processors ended up delivering performance around that of the EPYC 7551 previous-generation Naples processor. But overall the Talos II POWER9 had quite a respectable showing compared to the x86_64 CPUs.”

Not exactly int the “not at all” range imho.


Out of curiosity– why have you considered it? It seems like cool tech, but I have no practical use for it.


I got to use POWER8 and POWER9 when the company I was working for partnered with IBM. My main reason I liked them was: they’re very cool, heh. The other reason was I quite enjoyed the AltiVec instruction set was a great fit for the work I was doing, the integer vector instructions were awesome. Nothing you can’t do on X64, but was nicer in a few ways.




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