I'm not really a free software absolutist, but I do think it's worth putting my money where my mouth is sometimes, so I run a Raptor Blackbird (you could put one together for less than $3000). Raptor systems are still the fastest zero blob computers you can buy.

It's a bit sad to see such a well paid demographic (software engineers) completely disinterested in making any cost/speed/freedoms tradeoffs here.

> It's a bit sad to see such a well paid demographic (software engineers) completely disinterested in making any cost/speed/freedoms tradeoffs here.

This job is might be well-paid in the USA, but in many countries this is not the case; in consideration of the recent layoffs, I would even make a bet that the payment for software developers in the USA is about to change for worse.

Otherwise, I completely agree with your appeal.

$5,800 is almost the exact price a friend of mine paid for his Pentium 66MHz back in 1993 (1994?).

That was probably closer to like $12,000 in todays money

This, I would love to have some SPARC or PPC hardware, but it always comes down to price and power consumption (and noise because I'd probably be sleeping next to the thing)

Price is one thing, but the Talos 2 I'm typing this on is whisper-quiet. I only hear it when the fans spool up during a heavy compute job. Otherwise it's silent except for whatever case fans you choose to have.

Price is the major issue for me. I'd love to use one, but the same amount of compute power is available from big-brand manufacturers as low-end servers in the x86 space. It's hard to justify spending extra for a different ISA.

I get that, but if people want choices in architecture, then sometimes economies of scale won't be available for those less-common choices. I'm willing to pay more for a performance-comparable architecture that is more open and less hostile (and, as a bonus, is one I've worked with personally for decades), and I put my money where my mouth is.

Raptor is well aware of their price premium and tried very hard with the Blackbird, though I wanted the expansion power in the Talos II and would have always bought the bigger system first. But they still have to make a profit and I want to support them in it.

Don't get me wrong, my ARM stuff is quiet too, but if I wanted one of those dual-dual-core G5's from yesteryear, I'd need some earplugs. :)

I've got one of the Quad G5 Macs too, sitting right next to it (in fact, I upgraded from the Quad directly to the Talos 2).

The Quad is also very quiet in idle, but you have to downclock it in System Preferences to be as silent as the T2 is in normal operation, and even with a well-maintained liquid cooling system the G5's roar at full tilt is loud (it's really loud if it's not). The high speed fans in the T2 are more like a quiet whine than what the G5 generates, let alone the wind tunnel MDD G4 I ran before that. And no LCS!

And the G5 is doing that with four cores and four threads, while the Talos II is doing that with sixteen cores and 64 threads. Now, the Quad G5 also came out in 2005, and I got the T2 in 2018. But thirteen years later I'm happy to say that the noise level is absolutely no worse than any other modern workstation on x86_64.

That's the price of computing freedom.

Then you shouldn't be surprised that it's not popular.