Talos Workstation Powered by the IBM Power8 Looks to Reinvent Hardware Security for End Users
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Phoronix reports on the new Talos Workstation from Raptor Engineering that is coming soon for $3,100. The Talos is powered by IBM's epic Power8 RISC processor (often touted as the world's most powerful processor, especially for per thread performance) and is focused around ultimate workstation power and a degree of security impossible to achieve using other architectures. Not only does IBM ensure that the Power architecture is friendly to downstream open source projects (practically a necessity for extreme security) but the Power architecture itself is completely open. The Talos leverages this to deliver, what they call "open to the firmware." The entire stack from processor to bios to firmware to operating system is open and transparent allowing for protection that cannot be achieved in other ways.
The Talos is no toy, this will be, with little doubt, the most powerful workstation (by CPU power at the very least) ever made. No workstation on the market can compare to the number crunching power of a Power8 CPU. The Power8 is so powerful that it often ships as a single socket processor in very high end servers.
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It would not be unlikely for the power of this workstation to be comparable to more than the processing capabilities of a fully populated Proliant DL580 quad CPU Xeon server.
