Club OpenPOWER (and PowerPC)

For those of us who live the POWERful life.

Ideally focusing on modern OpenPOWER hardware (libre-SoC, Microwatt, POWER9) but you’re probably more likely to have a PowerBook or Power Mac laying around, and those are welcome too, as are RS/6000s, ThinkPad Power series, Motorola PowerStack, and Acube’s stuff.

Linux 5 is still being compiled for as low as PowerPC 603, and of couse POWER ISA 3.0 is well supported as the OpenPOWER Foundation is a subsidiary of the Linux Foundation.

Hopefully, whether Framework themselves do it or someone else (probably Acube) does, hopefully one day an ISA 3.0 compatible OpenPOWER board gets released for the Framework.

For now…


there’s always the classics.

I’m currently saving up for a Blackbird mainboard and four core CPU, I have the rest of the build besides it.

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For those of us who live the POWERful life.

Ideally focusing on modern OpenPOWER hardware (libre-SoC, Microwatt, POWER9) but you’re probably more likely to have a PowerBook or Power Mac laying around, and those are welcome too, as are RS/6000s, ThinkPad Power series, Motorola PowerStack, and Acube’s stuff.

Linux 5 is still being compiled for as low as PowerPC 603, and of couse POWER ISA 3.0 is well supported as the OpenPOWER Foundation is a subsidiary of the Linux Foundation.

Hopefully, whether Framework themselves do it or someone else (probably Acube) does, hopefully one day an ISA 3.0 compatible OpenPOWER board gets released for the Framework.

For now…


there’s always the classics.

I’m currently saving up for a Blackbird mainboard and four core CPU, I have the rest of the build besides it.

2 Likes

I’d love a talos II but I honestly don’t have 5-10 grand to drop on a computer, and being disabled & long term unemployed I’m unlikely to ever have that kind of disposable income. That said, the TDPs involved are a little scary the way electricity costs are currently going in the UK.

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I plotted out a build and it seems to me that with an RX 570, you could get away with a 550W power supply. At least, for the Blackbird with eight cores – I suppose a Talos II would be heavier. The 8 core is rated for 160 watts and only got up to 130 in stress tests. With how wide all the memory bandwidth and I/,O throughput is, it should last like 15 years of use.

FYI: Here is another PowerPC related thread. Is PowerPC about to make a comeback?

the high core packages are 190W each, and Talos II has two of them…

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Sure, but it’s from a year ago and isn’t really a general discussion focused more on owners of said hardware.

Only if you put them in there, their lowest level Talos II prebuilt comes with a single four core CPU by default. Talos II is honestly kind of bad value as a desktop system even for most developers unless you really, really want or know you will need the extra hardware, Blackbird is way cheaper and since each core has four threads and not two, and those cores are competing well against Xeons and Epycs, a single eight core should be more powerful than most people will ever need. Plus, Micro ATX is just a nicer form factor IMO as opposed to E-ATX.
My whole thing and part of why I’m even here is that I think building your own PC with used parts is the best value you can get. I came up with a figure around $3,000 for a Blackbird with higher spec than the baseline Mac Pro at $6,000.

the blackbird and talos II lite don’t have enough pcie slots for my needs.

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I don’t see how my thread was similar enough to this year old thread (every other forum I’ve ever posted on has considered necroposting a bad thing) to warrant the merge, but the many millions of AMD threads are all fine to be separate. Like, just scrolling down a little I can already see two different AMD has USB 4.0 threads that haven’t had anything done to them.

Fair enough. Still, the T2 with single 4-core isn’t too costly, it’s officially supported, and you can find the 4-core CPUs (02CY297) on eBay for $400 less than they cost from Raptor.

unfortunately the way the board is configured, both cpu sockets have to be populated to get all the pcie slots, so with one cpu it’s basically a lite with the potential to become a full.

OpenPOWER stuff isn’t readily available in the UK, so there’s basically no 2nd hand market either. So not only is the system expensive, there’ll be VAT and import fees on top of that.

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Ah, all of that’s fair. Hopefully the situation changes sometime soon over there! I have a feeling it will, RED is based in the UK.

In the meantime, it’s amazing how long all of these kick around for. I’m not even all that careful with them, but not a single PPC Mac I own has failed on me. Something I need to do is get a bunch of 18650s and re-cell all my batteries…
I imagine with dual 3450mAh-celled batteries and possibly even an undervolt and downclock to 233 or 266MHz, that Lombard might seriously get up close to literal all day battery life. The Rage Pro LT means it’s not really that useful for much besides light tasks like word processing and searching the web with FrogFind/68k News, and it’s part of the known faulty run that can’t boot into Mac OS X (at least, Mac OS X DP3 or later, I know for sure DP2 runs great on it) at all, so I don’t think I’ll feel it very much.

I suppose everyone here is familiar with this project : GNU/Linux Open Hardware PowerPC notebook - An Open Hardware project for everyone, a PowerPC Notebook for you. Join now!

It’s slow, COVID sure didn’t help, but they are putting in the work !

I’d love for them to half the work and focus on making a framework compatible board. Surely if POWER enthusiast are enthusiastic enough about buying a TALOS system, they wouldn’t buying a Framework to put their board into it. That would probably make for a better laptop than a Clevo build or something equivalent.

(I have no knowledge whatsoever about what I am talking about. Let me know if this idead is flawed/crazy)

since this project is already putting a board in somebody else’s laptop shell, in theory there’s no reason it couldn’t be a framework shell.

in practice, the framework13 may prove to be an issue due to how thin it is. the 16 on the other hand, may be doable and framework’s ethos would prove to their benefit in terms of longevity of the design/form factor. I do know there’s been discussions about it all potentially falling apart if/when the case they’re using ceases to be available.

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