Fully Open POWER System Only Raises 12% Of Goal, Extends Funding Another 30 Days

If you have been interested in the Talos Secure Workstation as a fully open system down to the firmware and based upon the POWER8 architecture but have been put off by the $3,700+ USD price simply to obtain the motherboard, they have extended their crowdfunding campaign by another thirty days with only having hit 12% of their goal.

The Talos Secure Workstation crowdfunding campaign launched back in October with a goal of raising 3.7 million dollars to make this fully-open system a reality, but today was their anticipated final day and they only raised $449k USD. Rather than calling it quits, they are extending their efforts by another 30 days in hopes of raising the more than three million dollars needed to pull off this challenge.

In today's update they sound optimistic they can still make it a reality, but we'll see. The ATX-compatible motherboard (without CPU) is slated to cost $3,700 USD while a desktop workstation with 128GB DDR3 ECC RAM, AMD Radeon RX 480, a POWER8 CPU, and SATA drives will cost $7100 USD. Or at the top end their 12-core Talos Workstation with 256GB DDR3, AMD FirePro or NVIDIA Tesla graphics accelerator, and storage will cost $17,600 USD. (Right, with those graphics cards mentioned, they all rely upon binary firmware blobs.) This open but modern system will set you back quite a bit if you want a fully-binary-free motherboard and the open-friendly POWER8 processor.

Those interested, with deep enough wallets, and confident in the ability to pull off this massive fundraising feat in the next month can find the details at Crowd Supply