Would you pre-order a Blackbird for $875?


Would you pre-order the new "Tiny Talos" Raptor Blackbird for $875? (Hint: compare this to the new weaksauce Space Gray Mac mini and you tell us what you'd rather buy.) We're planning to because we think this is a fabulous deal on powerful user-controlled hardware and a much lower barrier to entry to the POWER9 ecosystem, and we'll be reviewing it right here to see how viable the low-end spec can be. Do note this is mainboard cost, and while the Blackbird has lots of on-board peripherals, the RAM, storage and (probably) CPU will be extra (the base 4-core POWER9 right now appears on Raptor's site for $375). Either way, tell Raptor your interest level on their straw poll.

Comments

  1. Such a low end board would be acceptable for 500, thought I'm seriously considering it, since mATX would fit fine in a G5 case.

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  2. For me the price is still to high, i hope they will drop it.
    When you will get this Blackbird as i requested on another comment, if is possible to have a Debian Buster trial with Firefox, Virt-Manager, Vlc, Qbittorrent, Amule, LibreOffice and Firejail should be really appreciated.

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  3. I already answered: 875 USD for just the board is still to much for the generic user, sadly including me. My upper limit is 1000 USD for board+CPU+some RAM and I think this will be both practical and psychological limit for many potential users.
    I bought my G5 (used) in 2009 for about 600 USD and used it eight years for all my everyday tasks. This seems I have to wait until there is second-hand market with POWER9 machines as well...

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    1. There is already a second-hand market with Power8 HW, that's similarly open on the host side.

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  4. For the specs it seems way too high; absolute highest I would pay is $500. Why not offer (as another product) a more traditional closed POWER system for much cheaper? I think it's more important right now to get POWER in the hands of as many people as possible if they want to compete with Intel (as stated on twitter). I would love to build a complete POWER system for $1000.

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    1. How do they get it cheaper? Where is the economy of scale here? For a boutique arch I think this price is a steal. I don't think it's reasonable to ask them to lose money on a loss leader, either, especially because there will always be someone for which any given price is too much.

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  5. Several people here have put a $500 price tag. Where does this number come from? Is there a good justification for why that price point is "magical"? Why not $400 or $600?

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    1. Right, also compare for example Talos Lite with a design based on an embedded PowerPC, same price, but a magnitude higher performance and unmatched openness for Talos. Some expectations are unrealistic now.

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  6. I'll try to write my 2cent it's "my truth" not "the truth" keep it in mind.
    We don't know how much cost to develop and build this hw, so this price could be resonable or absurd, we can't know, or at least i don't know.
    What is sure, someone earn 3000$ per month and someone else 1000$ so if 900$ could be not too much for someone could be a no buy for someone else.
    For everyone who is interested on this architecture or open source hardware the goal is the same, spread this hardware as much as possible, this goal could be reached just dropping the price, because if a lot of people is interested on it, but can't afford it, "we have a problem". We cannot ask to Raptor to drop the price till they will fail, we can just ask them to drop the price as much as they can, but the real points are anothers.

    1) I think Raptor should talk with IBM and negotiate with them to have some help to reach this goal, IBM have a lot of money, they should invest in Raptor to invest in themself and their own architecture
    2) EU is a big market, buying those machine from EU is a pain in the a** the machines are not cheaper, but customs and taxes make them close to impossible to buy for a normal user. Raptor should make a deal with an EU reseller, trying to keep the price for the end comparable to USA customers, if the blackbird cost 875$ should cost nor more than 800€ at the current change 875$ are 767€ so there are margins for shipment and other costs on bigger volume, considering they will handle it at lower prices

    If both points will be reached the cost will drop down, happily for USA and EU market too, growing the selling volume and then dropping the manufacturing prices.
    I hope they will go for this before blackbird will reach the market, i think everyone will deserve an open hardware at affordable costs

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  7. Open source/libre tax I guess?
    In the end, I found that would be unwilling to pay for it regardless if this mobo was $900, $500 or $300. As an alternative platform the Raptor initiative is interesting and I like this initiative for that (they could keep from shitty FUD shilling in phoronix threads though), but fundamentally this is not for me.

    Because romantic urges to have unique hardware aside for sake of it, I'm completely fine with using PCs and appreciate their perks like ease of use, better tuned power efficiency - being more cheap, less costly to operate, more quiet too is more important to me.

    I might tolerate some small price premium (nowhere near as big as the current one - PC mATX boards like this cost $50-80...), but I guess the form factors, power usage/"big-ironness" of Power is in fact unattractive for me too. Going to get a simple mini-ITX with integrated graphics as my next machine, for these reasons. But it will be a DIY assembly from retail components, certainly not a polished anti-user turd like the new apple box (bleh!).

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