Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome aboard the System76 Transmission Log. The space station orbiting the Linux computer manufacturer, System76: home to handcrafted Open Source hardware and the makers of Pop!_OS.
You.
Three, two, 100:17.
Welcome aboard the
System76 transmission log.
Our broadcast is about to begin.
This is the latest on System76 computers,
manufacturing and PopOS
now for your inorbit crew.
Thanks for joining us.
Today's episode is packed with System76
updates, and we have two guest
interviews this episode.
I'm very excited, Emma.
I think these interviews are
going to be a lot of fun.
We'll have an interview with System76
founder and CEO, Carl Richell, and we have
an exclusive interview clip with
some of the members of Thelio head.
The hottest topic around the office,
basically this entire year has been the
Nebula PC cases and the
chassis changes to Thelio.
We've made some really cool engineering
updates to those products, and that
includes things that customers
have been asking for for a while.
We've updated our OSHA certification now
for both Nebula and Thelio, as well as Ce
certification for a few of
the Thelios in the line.
This also means that Thelio, Theliomira
and Thelio Major are now going to be able
to ship to the same
countries as our laptops.
Over 60 countries, which is huge.
Yeah, it took us a while to get that Ce
certification, and that's going to be big
for getting access to
Thelio around the world.
These desktops will have improved
airflow, better thermals.
They'll have top ports like USBC, USB, A
headphone and mic jack and cleaner cables
inside, so it's easier to move your hands
around while you're servicing the desktop.
The top I O is a nice one.
Yeah, it's been something that people
have been asking for, for a while.
And you'd be surprised as to how much
engineering work actually goes into adding
it to the chassis, because every minor
move of one area means a bunch of other
adjustments in all other
areas of the system.
And it's going to be nice for customers to
not have to reach around the back of their
desktop in order to plug in their mic
or connect a mouse or launch keyboard.
Now it's right there in front of you, much
more convenient, and I think people are
going to have an easy time with that.
There's a little bit of an
esthetic design change as well.
It's sleeker where the mountains were.
We've added another vent to the
air cooling, which is really nice.
And there was a lot of testing done to
make sure the chassis was optimized
for higher end compute components.
Yeah, when they do the Airflow testing,
they basically
move the fans a few millimeters to test
different positions and configurations
until they find the one with
the most effective airflow.
And the extra side intake vent goes a
long way to keeping your system cool.
I'm so excited about all these changes.
We're really stepping up our game with our
desktops, but we can't
forget about our laptops.
Yes, the Pangolin laptop also was just
updated, so those will now ship with
an AMD Ryzen 777 35 U processor.
That's about it for hardware news.
Cosmic changes are out of
this world this month.
Yes, some epic developments
in the cosmic realm.
Dynamic settings were added to keyboard
and mouse settings, meaning that when a
setting's changed, you'll
see its effects immediately.
You'll just see it live and can
keep toggling all over the place.
There's a new mode for
swapping your tiled windows.
So you hold Super X and you just hit the
arrow keys and it will show you which
window is about to be swapped
until you get to the right one.
The panel and dock settings
have also been implemented.
Each of those can be
customized to your liking.
OOH.
That means you can change their position
on screen, adjust size or opacity, add
margins, and see it in
either light or dark mode.
Yes.
A few other cosmetic improvements include
widgets like text inputs, search
fields and inline inputs.
And work was also done with symbolic icons
like the magnifying
glass in search fields.
And the desktop environment can make their
size and colors more
accurate to the theme.
You can find more details on that
in our latest Cosmic post at blog.
System76.
Com.
Wow, that is a lot of changes for Cosmic.
In addition to hardware and software
updates, we made a little
update to the website as well.
We released a sustainability
page at System76.
Com sustainability, where we highlight how
we reduce, reuse, recycle and replenish
components to preserve the environment.
That's it for the news this month.
The interview for this episode is with
System76 founder and CEO Carl Rochelle,
where he'll discuss what he's been working
on and the reasoning behind the
newly designed Thelio desktop line.
All right, we are now with Carl Rochelle,
CEO of System76, and excited to talk
to him about the new Thelio line.
So, Carl, what have you been up to lately?
Well, a lot.
The new Thelio line is a major improvement
for the product line, and it's also been a
large project for a lot of our teams, from
product engineering to production to
marketing, and the web
development team as well.
So a large project coordinating all the
pieces to get us to this new product.
What stirred about the changes?
There's a bit of history, maybe that would
be good to share to talk
about how we got here.
So about, I think it was three years ago,
maybe four years ago, AMD came to us and
they said, we have this 64 core
processor with 128 threads.
It's thread ripper, and it
doesn't work in Windows.
So we need someone to launch this with
because Windows isn't going to be able
to get the full performance out of it.
And of course, we were excited about that.
And they sent us samples and we
had about, I think, three weeks.
So we got these samples and they were 280
watt processors,
which means they generated just enormous
amounts of heat that the processors that
were coming up before
them just didn't produce.
And we needed to handle that in our
thermal system or in our Thelio system.
And so we got to work on that, and it was
a couple of weeks of really long nights.
But we developed a few innovations that
didn't require the case
getting any bigger.
It meant the volume on the desk could stay
the same, but we were able to fully cool
that 280 watt processor
without any throttling.
And the way we did it was originally the
design had cool air coming in from the
bottom, and the cool air was
shared amongst the GPUs and CPUs.
To improve upon that, we separated
the CPU cooling and the GPU cooling.
So now there was a separate channel for
CPU cooling with its own cool air intake,
and the GPUs had their
own cool air intake.
So it kind of started with that a few
years ago, and that first came to Thelio
Major, but then we wanted to push the
envelope further with Theliomega.
Sometimes when you design products, you
want to build something that just to see
if you can do it and just
see how much you can do.
And that's what Theliomega is.
It's able to handle over 1300 400 watts of
thermal energy, which
is a lot for a desktop.
But in doing that process and developing
that product over six to eight months, we
learned a lot about cooling much more
thermal energy than we needed
to in previous designs.
So what this new Thelio product line does
is it takes the innovation that we
developed when AMD came to us for the 64
core thread river, and the innovation we
developed to support quad GPUs and
Theliomega, and applies all of that
thermal engineering to the
rest of the product line.
Now, Thelio, Mira and Major have separate
channels and separate cooling for CPU and
GPU, which ultimately resulted in things
like the Thelio being able to support the
fastest Ryzen Nine processors available.
So they used to support up to Ryzen Seven.
Now it's up to Ryzen Nine in
a really small form factor.
So it's incredibly dense performance in a
small package, thanks to lots of effort
and time of designing really
efficient thermal systems.
In addition to the cooling, what are some
of the other Major changes to the line?
A big one is top I O ports.
So for years our customers
have asked for I O ports.
It's actually a little bit more
challenging than it seems because the top
of our case comes off
entirely from the internal.
And the reason we designed it that way is
because we wanted to make it
really easy to service Dalio.
So by the top case being one piece and
sliding off, you have access to the entire
all sides of the desktop to service it.
But in doing that, there's not like an
attached panel where the I O could stick
through so what we did this update is kind
of design in a mounting point on the
internal for the top I O, which includes
USBA headphone in, mic out and USBC.
So we designed a mounting point for that.
And then thanks to over the years, we've
bought a lot of machinery for the factory
and that machinery means we
have much tighter tolerances.
So now we're able to produce an internal
and external that always
marries really tightly.
And so those ports that are on the
internal when you slide the top on, marry
nice tightly and look
really sharp on the top.
Also with thermal cooling and thermal
changes because there's now side vents,
many more side vents on the side of the
systems I decided to remove the
etching that was on the sides.
The look is just much more
sleek and much more clean.
Nice.
I know you mentioned
easier serviceability.
How important was the right to repair
and the reasoning for the redesign?
It's a considerable part of it but when we
think about right to repair, it's
designed into every part of our process.
So failure was really easy to service
before and that was important to us.
We think ten out of ten ifixit ratings are
like one of the coolest things to get and
so we think about what things we would
need to do to get that kind of rating from
ifixit we went even further with this
design, the biggest change
was more fan headers.
So there are fan headers throughout the
system that make it really easy to service
but besides that, the system itself has
just built in characteristics makes
it easy to add memory, add drives.
The drive cage is easily accessible.
When you take the top off, you just put
screws in and the screws are included on
the internal so there's no separate screw
bag that you might hide away
somewhere and forget where it's at.
Everything's integrated into the chassis.
So if you want to add a two and a half
inch drive three years down the road, the
screws are all there inside
the chassis to do so.
Adding a GPU is as easy as removing four
screws, plugging it in and
putting the side brace back on.
So it's always important to us, it's
something that we think about
as being this inherent in our design
philosophy and our company ethos.
I've testified in support of right to
repair and we always support companies and
initiatives that are driving for
legislation that requires right to repair.
So what challenges did you
face during the redesign?
Well, when I think about designing
products, everything is just a bunch of
different things that
you're doing in order.
So I don't necessarily think product
design is challenging or something
particularly challenging.
I think of it as a project that's large
and then you take each individual piece
and you just try to make it smaller and
divide it so it's more approachable.
So I guess if I were to think about some
of the things that were unique about this.
We wanted to make manufacturing more
efficient and that meant removing some.
There's a part to the external that's
called an extrusion, or there was a part,
and the extrusions is what made the
curves around the edges of Thelio.
What we wanted to do was remove those
curves, both for esthetics, because it
created lines that went along the front of
the system, but also because assembling
the system with those extrusions took
a long time for the assembly team.
So we redesigned the exterior to use the
brake to create those big radiuses, and
we bought dies that go into the brake.
Brake is basically a large machine that
you slide a piece of metal into a hammer,
comes down, pushes on the metal
and creates a shape in it.
So now we're using a brake to create
that shape rather than a separate part.
The challenging part with that is that now
the extrusions had guides
that helped the top slide on.
So we needed to reproduce that ability
without having those guides because now
it's one piece of metal that goes
all the way around and just formed.
So we did some things on the internal,
like we added a guide on both sides, we
added small spacers on the front, so as
the top is put on, it feels like it stops
in the right place and slides down.
I think that was probably one
of the unique challenges.
One of the constant issues with
desktop design is PCI slots.
PCI slots were designed 40 years
ago, now something like that.
And GPUs are now enormous.
They weigh seven pounds, sometimes on
their own with all the cooling on
them, and they're three PCI slots.
Tall PCI slots just haven't evolved as the
hardware has evolved, but we still need to
support them and make it easy for our
customers to add PCI
devices or remove them.
So with this change, we have new GPU
bracing to help better secure
graphics cards when they're shipping.
We have new PCI slot covers so that it's
easier to slide them in and
they don't fall when shipping.
Just lots of small little
improvements like that.
This has really been almost a year in the
works and so there are tiny little
improvements in every
area inside of Thelio.
Airflow is a pretty major part of this
update and to my understanding,
it's a pretty meticulous process.
Do you want to get into just how much work
goes into our Airflow
changes for this release?
Yeah, so when we're working on Airflow,
one of the first things we do well, we
learn a lot with the Omega,
as I mentioned earlier.
But that doesn't necessarily apply to the
rest of the products because they have
different dimensions, they have different
number of fans, they have
different components in them.
And so we theorize about what changes are
going to improve the thermal
characteristics of the system and thermal
and acoustics are always combined as well
because the more you spin a fan, the
louder is on your desk and we
want to keep that system quiet.
So there's a balance between those two.
So we start with CFD, which is simulating
the thermal energy created by the
different components as well as the amount
of cool air and the CFMS
that are produced with fan.
And with that simulation we can knock off
maybe 60 or 70% of the different types of
cooling arrangements that we
might design into a product.
Then the next 20% to 30% is all minute
details in testing in real
time or on the real product.
So we'll take that, we'll develop, we'll
cut the product, we'll paint it, design
it, build it and then we start doing
hands on testing with that concept.
That's where we find that last 20% to
30%, like where the fence should go.
Sometimes millimeter differences
within the chamber make a difference.
Turbulence is a big deal inside of cases.
I often see computer cases that have
something like 15 fans in them.
And as impressive as it might look, what
happens with 15 fans is it creates
turbulent air that cannot flow in and out
efficiently and so it just
can't cool the system.
So fan placement and distance from each
other and paths for air, cool air to move
from the cool place through the hot place
and out and exhaust out is
exceptionally important.
That's a bit of the process for us and how
we go from kind of concept to simulation
to eventually the final product.
And we certainly talk about
airflow a lot during this release.
I think it's pretty big that it continues
to prevent throttling even as the latest
components draw so much more power.
But people might be wondering, well, if
the airflow is so strong, the
computers must be really loud, right?
Yeah, and that's the balance.
So if you have that system that has 15
fans in it, it's going to be really noisy.
But there are lots of subtle things.
One that's balancing the right amount of
fans as well as developing fan curves that
are appropriate for the
amount of energy being used.
So if the CPU isn't being utilized heavily
but the GPU is, then
let's spin the GPU fans.
If it's the CPU that's being used and not
the GPU, let's use the CPU fans so we can
reduce the number of fans
running at higher speeds.
Also just the balance of the overall
system by having cool air come in from
different places but without conflicting
with each other then those fans can
move at slower RPMs to cool the system.
So there's a fan on the bottom and there's
a fan on the side both bringing in
separate cool air channels
that help with that.
The quality of the fans matter a lot.
That has to do much more with the motors,
somewhat with the blades as well.
But a lot with the motors and how quiet
the motor is when it's spinning up and
down, and a balance with the fan curve.
What often doesn't sound good is wrapping
up the fan really quickly and then cutting
it down quickly as well
because it's a jarring sound.
So wrapping up smoothly and bringing the
fan down smoothly also provides better
acoustic experience for customers.
Then you can really get into some kind of
crazy stuff like the shape of
the vents make a difference.
We haven't gotten into that quite as
much, but it's something we think about.
And that might be another area for us to
work on, because right now
the sound is high quality.
But I do wonder what the shape creates,
both the flow of the air coming in as well
as causing some acoustic characteristics.
So there might be some things that we can
do to even push the envelope further
by looking at the vent design.
Awesome.
What's next for Thalia?
The next thing we're going to do so there
are a lot of improvements here, like the
top IO, just manufacturing improvements,
PCI improvements, different
bracing that's improved shipping.
Those were applied to Thelio,
Theliomira and Thalium major.
Of course, we have a brand new product,
Thelio Spark, that we should probably talk
about a bit, but Theliomega
hasn't received those.
So Theliomega was the inspiration for a
lot of the engineering changes that
came down to the rest of the line.
But now we're going to apply all the
things that we did over the course
of the last year in Thelio to.
So that's our first step.
We are looking into
developing a Thelio miner.
That's been a long standing
project we'd like to do.
Essentially, that would be a Thelio design
that replaces our meerkat, but we don't
have quite a timeframe on that yet.
It's just in the conceptual phases so far.
So Theliospark, it's our new desktop.
Talk a little bit more about why
it came to be and who it's for.
All right, so Thelio Spark, the Thelio
line has always been a professional
high end desktop line.
Theliospark doesn't really take the high
end part away, but it introduces our
products to a new kind of
starter class of desktop.
One of the things about thelo line before
Spark was that all of the components
were exceptionally high end.
If you didn't necessarily need an I Seven
or I Nine processor or Ryzen Seven or
Ryzen Nine, you'd be getting oversized
cooling that wasn't adding
any value or performance.
You'd be getting a more expensive power
supply that didn't add value or
performance for a starter desktop.
And when you combine these different
things, like a very high end, high quality
case plus unnecessarily oversized
components, the cost was too high.
It was in the professional class price.
But that alienated customers that don't
necessarily need that kind of performance.
And that's where Spark comes in.
Spark is our starter desktop.
That has the same high quality standards
that we have across the rest of our
product line, but supports up to I five
processors and 40 60 graphics cards.
So it's essentially like
your 1080p gaming machine.
It's great for computer labs, it's great
for programming, particularly beginning
programming, scripting, things like that.
It's great for 1080p gaming, great for
family desktop, great as a general purpose
business desktop for productivity tasks.
It's a new market for us and a new product
that I think is much better aligned, price
wise for the performance that a lot of
customers need that we haven't
supplied products for before.
All right, and I don't know if you know
this, but we now have a band named after
our desktop line, and I'm wondering if
you're excited for their new single.
Yeah, I only heard, like, a small cut, so
I'm very excited to hear their new song,
and I think I'm even more excited
about the music video that's coming.
I hear it's pretty entertaining.
Yeah, I hear from the band members that it
was definitely entertaining to
film, so I'm excited for it myself.
Yeah.
Do you know what inspired the band?
Yeah, I think they first came about from
just the ambition of
saying, you know what?
We're going to open a factory and
start manufacturing our own desktops.
And then with that, the continued
iteration upon iteration of the desktops
to make sure that they're the best
product that they can possibly be.
And I think there's definitely
something inspiring about that.
Now, I can't say I've ever heard a song
about a specific computer, but I certainly
am excited to hear how that turns out.
That just means past due.
Precisely.
Oh, my gosh.
Also, have you seen the
Thelio head BandPage?
Yes, I have, Emma, and it's amazing.
The team did a fantastic job making
the new Thelio designs come to life.
And shout out to Marin in Mechanical
Engineering, as well as all of the
build team for such fantastic work.
On this, we actually have a clip of
Theliohead's interview with the Trolling
Stone from when they got interviewed
about their upcoming single.
And let's play that clip.
Thelio heads.
Welcome to the Trolling Stone podcast.
We are so excited about
your upcoming single, Flow.
Want to tell the listeners
a little bit about that?
Fierce have always been inspired by System
70 Six's engineering, and this
time the Thelio desktops.
They prevent throttling even in the newest
components, and they
are the most powerful.
And we're very excited to use these
systems and just see for
ourselves how powerful they are.
Flow is about the premium airflow you
get in these desktops, and we wanted.
A sound that matched how much
we regard this engineering.
Yeah, totally agree.
We also loved the new Thelio Spark.
It just released, so that was also
a big part of our inspiration.
And just in time for us to.
Get a new bassist.
Oh, our new bassist, he's such a vibe.
We absolutely love the bass lines he's
providing and we can't wait
for you all to hear them.
When you hear Flow, such a burst.
Of energy to the sound, to the band.
We are so lucky to have this.
Talent and I think everyone is dying
to know what is next for Thelio Head.
Well, I know everyone was wondering.
We saw your questions on Insta, but
we do have a music video coming out.
We just had the best time filming it and
I cannot wait for the world to see it.
There was dancing.
It was a blast to film.
And we are so excited for you.
Guys to see this.
As a fan of Thelio Heads music
myself, I can't wait to see it.
I just really think this is going
know, push us to a new level.
Like I'm really imagining world tour.
I've always wanted to go to Japan and I
really think Flow is
going to get us there.
That's great.
And can we expect any new merch
to be coming out with the single?
Lots of new merch.
We have crop tops, bumper
stickers, sweatpants.
We have pens and pencils.
Lots of stickers too.
We know everybody wants to put a
sticker on their new filio spark.
Totally.
I'm going to need all of
that when it comes out.
Thank you all so much for joining us
today and good luck with the release.
Thank you for having us.
Yeah, thanks so much.
Thank you.
Three, two, one, p zero it.
This has been the
System76 transmission log.
For more inspiration, check out the
website and follow us on social media.
On your descent back to Earth, please keep
your hands and feet inside the
transport beam at all times.
Captain, sign off in transmission.