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It doesn't look like the Talos Secure Workstation will see the light of day with it's crowdfunding campaign ending this week and it's coming up more than three million dollars short of its financing goal. [Editor note: It did not meet the funding goal.] Now there's another effort to offer a libre system but using off-the-shelf x86 hardware.
[...] Libreboot developer Leah Rowe is now launching a libre system out of the ashes of the Talos Secure Workstation. She wrote in an email to Phoronix, "It's a high-end desktop/server platform, available in either configuration. It also supports virtualization and PCI passthrough, unlike older systems, so Qubes would be compatible...TALOS looks set to fail. Crowd Supply has removed it from their homepage, and Raptor Engineering is writing up an announcement that TALOS is shutting down - they are going to link to Minifree and tell people to purchase Libreboot D16 from me."
But before getting too excited, this isn't a new platform but rather an existing AMD server motherboard that simply comes pre-loaded with Libreboot to free the firmware/BIOS and then loaded with Debian GNU/Linux. The desktop and server versions make use of an AMD Opteron 6272, a.k.a. the older 32nm "Interlagos" CPUs derived from Bulldozer and released back in 2011.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Wednesday January 18 2017, @09:45PM
I was very interested and initially signed up after heading about it. After fully costing it out, it was way out of my budget. They were selling the mainboard, which was pretty expensive, and you then had to buy a pretty expensive POWER CPU to put on it. Freedom has a price, and I would have very much liked to have been able to stump up the cash, but it was a good bit beyond what I could justify. Low volume runs of custom hardware will command a premium, so the high price is certainly understandable.
Where I think this failed was that it was a high-end board for a high-end CPU. If they had been able to design a cheaper and simpler board with lower end POWER CPUs that might have been more affordable for more people. On the board side that might have been possible, IBM don't really do low end POWER chips though.
I know IBM got out of commodity hardware, but it would benefit the POWER platform as a whole for there to be a reference board or something which is accessible to average joes; if it encouraged adoption of the platform in the workplace it would make it cost effective. I used to use PowerPC Macs for this--affordable powerpc hardware, what's not to like. But there's nothing in that ballpark today that I'm aware of.