Condor cancelled


Raptor has confirmed that, unfortunately but not unexpectedly, the LaGrange-based Condor that was announced at the OpenPOWER summit last year has been cancelled due to economic concerns. Certainly any new high-end product would be tough to launch in the present COVID-19 economy, and because its size (ATX) and capabilities (single CPU, OpenCAPI, four slots) would have slotted it between the Talos II and the Talos II Lite in our view, there just isn't a lot of slack not served by those two existing products to soak up. It's probably just as well because I think getting ready for POWER10 would mean more to many users (it certainly would to me), but that itself requires a lot of R&D capacity and Raptor's a small company. Rather than a niche POWER9 design, here's hoping the resources that would have gone to Condor will go to a really kick-a$$ new Rainier-based system instead.

Comments

  1. Raptor here...without going into too many details, yes, Condor is a pure COVID19 casualty. Much of the design work was already completed but it just doesn't make sense to put it into production given the world economic status.

    There will probably be some exciting announcements for POWER hardware late this year / early next. Not POWER10 yet (IBM made some very poor choices regarding POWER10 that currently block our products and that we continue to work to resolve) but POWER overall is looking quite healthy for the future. For now, POWER9 is definitely the best way to go to get an open, owner-controlled, powerful system with long term support and tons of distro choices!

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    Replies
    1. Unfortunate about the choices regarding POWER10. Anything you can elucidate on? Hopefully they'll get that sorted out.

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    2. Not yet. We're keeping it a bit under wraps at the moment while negotiations etc. are carried out, but suffice it to say any POWER10 systems from competitors in the interim will not meet the normal Raptor standards due to the causative IBM decisions.

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