Recent Posts

91

Blackbird / Re: Price of Blackbird went up $1,144 from April 2020

« Last post by cchinicz on April 12, 2021, 10:45:43 am »

This has to do with a number of things. But it should be noted that the fees that were listed separately in the past are now included in the price.

Which fees? I paid $2,850 April 2020 for the Blackbird (mounted desktop). There were no fees on top of this price.

92

Blackbird / Re: Price of Blackbird went up $1,144 from April 2020

« Last post by MPC7500 on April 12, 2021, 10:35:38 am »

This has to do with a number of things. But it should be noted that the fees that were listed separately in the past are now included in the price.

93

Blackbird / Re: Price of Blackbird went up $1,144 from April 2020

« Last post by cchinicz on April 12, 2021, 06:25:15 am »

The price for a Blackbird is $1,558.19 today, ~$400 more compared to ~1 year ago.

Edit: Oh you're referring to the desktop (BK1SD1). My guess is that building such a system has become more costly because a) it needs more time than just putting a mainboard in a box and ship it and b) Tim's calendar is full, so time has become more valuable.

I meant the assembled desktop which sells for $3,994 on Raptor's web site (see attached).

94

Blackbird / Re: Price of Blackbird went up $1,144 from April 2020

« Last post by vikings.thum on April 12, 2021, 03:45:43 am »

The price for a Blackbird is $1,558.19 today, ~$400 more compared to ~1 year ago.

Edit: Oh you're referring to the desktop (BK1SD1). My guess is that building such a system has become more costly because a) it needs more time than just putting a mainboard in a box and ship it and b) Tim's calendar is full, so time has become more valuable.

95

Talos II / Re: quiet rack mount cases e.g. water cooled or 5U, 140mm fans

« Last post by JollyRoger on April 11, 2021, 05:55:50 pm »

Hey guys,

I can do some sheet metal design and CAD if you guys want, if I have enough spare time. I thought I'd chime in on this.

96

Blackbird / Price of Blackbird went up $1,144 from April 2020

« Last post by cchinicz on April 11, 2021, 01:20:21 pm »

Hey guys, I've just seen the price for the (backordered) brand new Blackbird and found out that it went up $1,144 since I bought it back in April 2020.

I'm wandering if this is the same unit I bought or maybe there are some changes. As far as I could check, its the same power9 CPU, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD. Am I missing something?

97

Talos II / Trying out GUIX on my Talos II

« Last post by isengaara on April 10, 2021, 02:36:48 am »

I recently saw a post on the GUIX mailing list "Please review blog post draft: powerpc64le-linux support"

> I've been using the Free Software firmware replacement for the NIC
> since a while now and it's working great:
> https://github.com/meklort/bcm5719-fw/

So I compiled the firmware and installed it on my Talos II. When GUIX for powerpc64le-linux comes out, I will try out.

98

Applications and Porting / Re: Blender on Talos II and Fedora Workstation

« Last post by dgcreations on April 08, 2021, 03:10:52 pm »

Thanks MauryG5 

99

Applications and Porting / Re: Blender on Talos II and Fedora Workstation

« Last post by MauryG5 on April 08, 2021, 01:45:22 pm »

Guys, I am my friend,  I gave him a hand to look out into the Power world and now he is also part of the family, see if you can help him. I personally do not use Blender but I think it is also the usual problem that we Power users have, namely software optimization for our platform. Then of course for sure I told him that as soon as he can you have to mount a nice graphics card to make everything run much better and then that to use Xorg, he needs to create the xorg.conf.d file with all the graphics card output that mounts.

100

Applications and Porting / Blender on Talos II and Fedora Workstation

« Last post by dgcreations on April 08, 2021, 12:38:27 pm »

Hi, I'm new to the Linux world and new Talos II user, a bit using Raspberry Pi, from 1993 to 2005 I used Amiga 68k and PPC systems, for a short time Windows on x86 and since 2006 Mac intel, the latest arrival was the MacMini M1 that I mainly use with the Blender that I am learning to use. I got closer to the Amiga world in October of last year and I learned about the Raptor's OpenHardware cards so that I was firing the BlackBird. Power Architecture fascinates me a lot, so that looking for information on these cards I found a Talos II dual power9 (4 core) on a used market in Italy, so I bought it and now here I am. Yesterday I assembled the card with slightly dated hardware just to try it, I installed Fedora Workstation and the first software I installed was Blender that I found on the Fedora graphic store, the version is 2.91.1, therefore very recent, I used it on a Shappire HD3450 graphics card, but also moving or rotating the cube that is displayed when Blender is opened is slow and jerky, probably the system cannot take advantage of the graphics card I have mounted but I thought that the Very powerful CPU could still make the movement smooth. On the advice of a friend I disabled Wayland and on restart Fedora no longer appeared on the pci graphics card but on the integrated graphics, certainly slower than the HD3450 but not that much, in particular with Blender it went slightly slower but I found it more stable, in fact the system with the HD3450 more than once crashed so I assume there is a compatibility problem.
Another thing I noticed that from the Blender preferences under "System" the "Cycles render device" section does not appear in fact the only engine available is eevee, also trying a test rendering of the cube it takes 16 seconds, as time it seems too high compared to the Mac M1, but anyway looking at the system monitor I noticed that the total CPU load is around 10% in fact the CPU fans are running at minimum. I would like to know if any of you use Blender and if you can use 3D acceleration with OpenCL and modern graphics cards and if you can use the Cycles rendering engine and if so how to do it, sorry but I know little about Linux.