HACKER Q&A
📣 the_only_law

Anyone bought the Raptor Systems POWER9 machines?


https://raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html

I’ve been extremely curious of these ever since I read about them a few years ago. They seem neat, but are wildly expensive for what seems to be a very uncommon architecture. Only other modern POWER systems I can think of offhand are the IBM i series.

Has anyone bought or used these? What enticed you to purchase it? Do you get an sort of advantage over a powerful x86 workstation? I’m trying to figure out who their market is.

  👤 TacosAndKisses Accepted Answer ✓
I bought and use one of their lighter models as my daily driver. They weren't so expensive before the supply chain disruptions but I agree they are nominally expensive. My motivations were primarily to free my computing as much as possible and to bolster the security of my already hardened system design.

I do not feel the computer is any faster or slower than my previous x86 systems, so I guess that can be painted in a good light so far as it works well enough that one wouldn't notice. The only thing I have encountered is 4K video playback can be a bit slow. Something with the altivec implementation that is beyond my comprehension. And not all packages are built for powerpc in every distro so I also find myself building certain programs from source, mainly games.

The takeaway: I bought for freedom and user control rather than for power and performance.

👤 deep_blue
I was in the same place as you were, and I made the jump right before the pandemic hit. I was really glad I got it, as I was properly distracted when things were just starting.

Sure, you have to be aware of certain packages that are CPU specific, but the awareness of what chip you are running is being talked about more and more, so I see that as a non-issue and is a matter of time before things are not platform specific (unless the have to be, for whatever reason).

I was unable to find any issues with running software that is platform agnostic, and most mature open source applications take into account that you may not run on x86.

YMMV, but the only issue I had was with OnlyOffice. I have not tried to build it on Power since I put the ticket in, but they have addressed the issue of it not building on Power.

https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/build_tools/pull/87

The WiKi, The Forums, and the IRC are great! I was able to un-brick my BMC by using those resources, so it does not feel scary to get your hands dirty when working at such a low level.

I posted my experiences of this from about a year ago on the forums, its one of the most viewed pages on there.

https://forums.raptorcs.com/index.php/topic,99.0.html

Hope this helps with your purchasing decisions!

👤 hlandau
There's an entire community of Talos users on IRC, so you might be interested to ask there. https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/IRC