POWER8 Talos Workstation Drops Price Slightly, Long Way From Being Funded

Last month the Talos Secure Workstation launched on crowd-funding as a fully-open libre, modern system powered by a POWER8 processor priced at $4k for the motherboard or $18k for the complete system. They have only raised less than 10% of their funding goal so far but have now cut costs a bit.

For those unfamiliar with the Talos Secure Workstation we covered it at length earlier this year in this article along with some prototype benchmarks.

Earlier this month they announced a lower price where now it's listed for $3,700 USD for the motherboard, a discount of $400.

The project has also shared some early virtualization tests too and a GPU passthrough demo.

Though even with a $400 discount, it's still a tough sell for those without very large budgets. Timothy Pearson who leads Raptor Engineering, the company behind the Talos Secure Workstation, described the funding campaign in a recent email to Phoronix, "this system has become a sort of referendum on whether or not libre software will be relegated to retrocomputing, or whether it can continue to be used to build next-generation solutions." As of this morning they raised $314k of their 3.7 million dollar goal with 25 days left to their campaign. The $314k so far comes from 184 pledges.