This is a very important machine that really deserves to get built. Anyone who cares about Free Software should consider funding this project at some level, and spreading the word to their friends. If this project succeeds, it will bootstrap a market for new, owner-controlled performant desktop machines. If it fails, no such computers will exist. The project page and updates explain the current (rather depressing) state of general purpose computing better than I could, so take a look.
I do hope that this gains some traction. Open Power has been a rather impressive little thing that I have been looking into. My only real concern is two things, heat and affordability.
The reason that I question heat has a lot to do with PowerPC’s history (which I know isn’t quite the same as POWER), but there will come a point where there will be manufacturers will look to putting something like the Telos Workstation into a laptop or smaller and how it handles heat displacement will be important.
The second is rather self evident, I would rather something like the Telos outside of the academic sphere. I know now isn’t the time to be too concerned with that but it is something that will be important, because the more that this pushes itself out of the high-end, the more than it will be easy to acquire.
> I would rather something like the Telos outside of the academic sphere.
For that I think ARM fits perfectly well.
What ARM machines are new, high-performance for general purpose computing, and fully-owner controllable? Look at the EOMA68-A20 and ASUS C201 columns in the tables on the project page. Those are the closest ARM machines available today that qualify (sort of — the A20 is not new), and they’re low performance. If you know of others, I’d be interested to know and they should probably be added as a column in those tables.