On Sun, Oct 8, 2017 at 3:11 PM, Steven Schear <schear.steve@gmail.com> wrote:

Why not switch to much more open CPUs (e.g. POWER8/9) which are already comparable to much of Intel's higher end server chips.

Power8 is an intermediate generation now on phaseout, where Power9 seems more part of a fuller openpower initiative that might stand up to Intel / AMD. The entire early 9 production output was being vacuumed up by military / big data / compute, and retail is taking a while to evolve. It's good stuff however power is still an expensive platform for non enterprise end users to just buy casually, and to pay electric on, but the openness might win. Power9 scaleout SO is rather less than scaleup SU versions. If you want me to switch and get in the game early, perhaps with review coinmining and shell ftw, you know what to do... ;) BTC:1CQYSaF8Cqx5ZSgaKG9LE8UrEJAkWqFpLa https://wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation https://wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER9 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12351319 https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/04/06/inside-future-google-rackspace-power... https://blog.rackspace.com/the-latest-zaius-barreleye-g2-open-compute-openpo... https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/09/19/power9-rollout-begins-summit-sierra/ https://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/07/15/open-sourced-bios-helps-power8-com... http://www.theplatform.net/2015/03/23/inside-the-rackspace-openpower-megaser... https://www.servethehome.com/?s=openpower https://www.anandtech.com/SearchResults?q=openpower http://www.storagereview.com/search/node/openpower https://hn.algolia.com/?query=power9&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://raptorcs.com/TALOSII/ https://raptorcs.com/content/base/faq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14956257 http://tyan.com/campaign/OpenPOWER/ https://github.com/open-power https://github.com/openbmc https://wiki.freebsd.org/POWER8 https://www.freebsdnews.com/2015/03/04/freebsd-power8-its-alive-2/ https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=279189 https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2015-01-2015-03.html#FreeBSD-on-P... https://reviews.freebsd.org/search/query/oIdoWWKTe71p/ https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.8-More-POWER9 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Power-Changes-Linux-4.12 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raptor-Talos-2-Teaser https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Talos-2-POWER9-Pre-Order https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Talos-2-FSF-RYF-Possible http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/only-a-short-time-left-to-pre-order-the-... Minimum to boot and scale cost users roughly $3300 incl 2x cpu, ps, 32gb.