POWER for open source enthusiasts: what is coming?
Recently I was at EuroBSDCon, where several participants recognized that I am a POWER guy. And they were right, I have been an IBM POWER Champion focusing on open source software on POWER for the past three years.
Talos II POWER9 mainboard
I got the usual question from people: is there anyone working on an affordable and open source friendly POWER machine? My answer was a definite yes, but also had to admit that I do not know the actual status for any of the projects. I looked around again and did not find any updates for this year. Still, I collected some pointers, as these might be interesting also outside of the BSD community.
- The OpenPOWER foundation has a PowerPI special interest group, which plans to create a small and affordable POWER computer. https://openpowerfoundation.org/
- Raptor Computing announced on Twitter that they are working on new POWER machines, Talos III and Blackbird II: https://x.com/RaptorCompSys/status/1715147706061168822
It is almost the end of the year, so I am not sure if we will see any actual hardware this year, but I hope that we will have at least a couple of announcements before the end of the year.
By the way: if you want an open source friendly POWER machine now Raptor Computing is the place to go. Even if POWER 9 energy efficiency is not the best by today’s standards, they provide fully owner controlled computing using OpenPOWER, which is something completely unique in the world of computers.