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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.
Alex, tell me something funny.
Alex:Peanuts.
Emma:That's not very funny.
Alex:They're kinda funny looking. They're like an hourglass shaped nut.
Emma:Yeah. I guess.
Alex:And they, like, you put them on a table and they kinda wobble. You know? They're like
Emma:do you have any Halloween plans?
Alex:I'm gonna be at ATO the weekend before, all things open. Open Source Conference, North Carolina. Come by the system 76 booth if you're there.
Emma:Alright. Not enjoy your
Alex:holiday again. Yeah.
Emma:Are you looking forward to that? Is that your first time going to All Things Open?
Alex:It is my first time at All Things Open, so I'm excited to meet the people, see the scenes, and get going in the open source space.
Emma:So they always have this social at a barcade after, I think, the first night they have it. And it's super fun, but it's right next to this rib joint. Well, I don't think it's meant to be a rib joint, but their ribs are really, really good. Maybe it is meant to be a rib joint, actually. I don't quite remember.
Emma:It's been a couple years. Well, it's a really nice restaurant right next to the Barcade, and I hope it still exists because I want you to try it if you go to that social event.
Alex:I hope so too. It sounds delicious.
Emma:Yes. I have pictures of me eating ribs because they were so good. I wanted to take a picture. I don't do that very often, but they were picture worthy. Even though ribs are pretty gross looking, but they were really good tasting.
Emma:So
Alex:If you're listening, you'll see that picture on our social channels pretty soon.
Emma:No. I'm not gonna post that picture, or maybe I will. Yeah. It's kinda funny.
Alex:I didn't mean to, like, volunteer you. I was Yeah.
Emma:You just did. Yeah.
Alex:3, 2,
Joe Speed:1, 0, 7.
Crew Communicator:Welcome aboard the System 76 Transition Lock. Our broadcast is about to begin. This is the latest on System 76 Computers, Manufacturing, and Pop!OS. Now for your inner of the crew.
Emma:We have a spooky episode for you this month.
Alex:We do. No one said I'd be spooked.
Emma:Not really, but it would be fun if we had some cool Halloween sound effects in between sections.
Alex:Sounds like like, oh.
Emma:Yeah. That was your cue to insert a a spooky noise in there because you have a really good zombie one too.
Alex:Oh, that's okay. I'll do the zombie one.
Emma:Nice. I think
Alex:my first one was better.
Emma:Alright, Alex. What's new this month?
Alex:Well, we've got a Halloween sale kicked off, so that's a $100 off select laptops. We've got the lemur, darter, oryx, and adder ws on sale. And for desktops, we have $300 off Thalia spark, $200 off Thalia and 100 off Thaleo Major and Thaleo Mira. So very exciting. Get your new computer before our spooky season ends on November 7th, and make sure you get some discounted candy in the process.
Emma:Yes. You can find all these specials on our specials page, and you can find the candy at your grocery store.
Alex:Candy.
Emma:Alex, what's going down with cosmic this month?
Alex:At time of recording, it's pretty recent, but at time of listening, last month, we released the second alpha of cosmic. For those of you who started on the first alpha, you'll just be able to update to it. We changed our release cycle, so we're having an alpha each month until we're feature complete, and then we'll roll into a beta. For alpha 2, we built out the files application. We've got some important settings pages like Bluetooth and wifi.
Alex:There's an ethernet wired connection page, all sorts of good stuff. We have laid the groundwork for accessibility, so it's not quite in a testable state, but it is definitely making progress. And there were some highly requested window management features. There's cursor follows focus. So when you open a new window, your mouse will just automatically snap to the top left corner of the window.
Alex:So you don't have to move it there and nice and efficient. And focus follows cursor, so if you hover your mouse over a window, that window will come into focus. So you don't have to click on it so that it gets focused. So just nice and efficient features, quality of life stuff, and I think people are really gonna enjoy it.
Emma:Nice. I like that we're gonna be launching every month because my favorite thing in the world is when we launch new products. So Oh. Enter Thaleo Astra, a new member of the system 76 desktop line and the Thaleo Head band. Does everyone remember the Thaleo Head band with their hit singles Thaleo Head band.
Emma:Slow?
Alex:It's been on my mind, Emma.
Emma:Oh, good.
Alex:So there's a new song this time with a new singer. Astra is the singer, and Thaleo Astra is our new ARM based desktop, that runs MPI processors. This desktop is a workstation for autonomous vehicle development, software defined vehicle development, and arm enthusiasts. It offers lots of cores at less power consumption and less cost. There's a lot of people out there who are gonna enjoy that.
Emma:I think we should go into some more details, like specs for our nerds out there. Can I do my Price is Right spiel?
Alex:Please do.
Emma:Enjoy an ARM developer's dream workstation, the Thaleo Astra. Specs go up to 128 core Ampere Ultra M128 Dash 33 Gigahertz Processor, 512 Gigabyte Octa Channel DDR 4 ECC RAM at 32 100 Megahertz, NVIDIA RTX 60008 GPU, and 8 terabytes PCIe 4 point o m two storage.
Alex:Excellent work.
Emma:Enjoy having Thaleo Astra on your desktop there. That's the end.
Alex:And I believe it will be the driving force for those endeavors.
Emma:I like it.
Alex:Our interview guests this month are here to talk about Thaleoastra and the engineering behind it.
Emma:Yes. We have Joe Speed from Ampere to talk about how Thaleo Astra is being used in the autonomous vehicle industry, and we have Tony and Britton here to talk about the engineering work done to launch this product.
Alex:And now, let's go into the interviews.
Emma:Today, we have Joe Speed joining us from Ampere. Thanks for joining us today, Joe. We wanted to start by talking about how you became connected with System 76 and what you do at Ampere.
Joe Speed:Sure. Happy to. So one of the things I've always been really passionate about is grassroots open source community. So I've been doing that stuff for a lot of years.
Joe Speed:I did a Linux Foundation. If you're an IOT nerd and you use MQTT, that's partially my fault. The friends of mine invented it, but I spent years getting me to open source. And, really, like, working grassroots community, working with enthusiasts and tinkerers and home labbers and makers with a lot of this technology, and then they turn around and they bring it into the workplace. And so for the work that I've been doing around Arm Native, Automotive, robotics, all these kinds of things, I know how important the developer community is.
Joe Speed:And I knew system 76, you occupy a really interesting place in that ecosystem. And so I started over a year ago reaching out to system 76, talking about getting something going. So Carl, Jeremy, folks, they got some Ampere gear in house. You were using it in house for, like, 9 months to develop the Pop!OS for ARM 64. You're doing some Raspberry Pi stuff, like developing, building, testing, ARM software, mostly for Pi community.
Joe Speed:And, and that's at the point which you all decided that there is something there, and we got really serious about what can we do together. What can we do in a big way? So that's kind of my journey there with y'all. As far as Ampere, I had worked with Arm developing a reference platform for software defined vehicle and autonomous driving. And we needed this kind of multi core, many core silicon, for this program and Ampere was the obvious fit.
Joe Speed:So I started developing products using Ampere and then Ampere asked me to come join the company. So I'm the head of Edge, so the easiest way to think of that is I lead and drive everything we do that's not in the data center, not in the cloud. And so, what we do around developer desktops, space, autonomous vehicles, 5 gs, content distribution networks like medical imaging, all of these kinds of topics. So, putting dense compute, efficient AI, sustainable infrastructure out there
Tony:in the world.
Emma:And I know you had your hands on one of our preproduction units, the Thaleo Astra, what were your initial thoughts?
Joe Speed:So y'all do such brilliant work. Like, I work with a ton of companies. And for a lot of them, what's kind of exercise of, like, well, I I had an Intel motherboard, and now I have a ARM motherboard, and I just stick them in the same chassis. And so I was super impressed with I don't know if everyone realizes. The System 70 6 products in in general and things like Thaleo in particular, these are not just built.
Joe Speed:They're not just assembled. Like, these things are designed and thought about and engineered and tested in simulation. And you are doing this airflow fluid dynamics, like, hot spot simulation, and you really put a lot of thought into this, and it's kind of amazing. And I've spent some time at the factory there. So me and my buddy, Ken Peterson here at Ampere, and it's just it's really incredible.
Joe Speed:It's sheet aluminum and aluminum billet enters the factory at one end, and it leaves the factory as beautiful finished product at the other end. And to have that happening made in USA, that's a really big deal for me. That's so incredible.
Emma:And how did it compare to other machines that you've seen in the past?
Joe Speed:Well, you guys know your product. They're really quite beautiful. Right? There's a lot of craftsmanship that goes into this in quality, And it's for anyone who's listening to this podcast, it's no mystery, no surprise that you have some serious open source and Linux and firmware and desktop development chops. Something near and dear to my heart is the whole Rust topic.
Joe Speed:And so what you're doing with Cosmic, what Jeremy is leading with Redos redux? Redos, the is incredibly important, and this will really resonate. This is important stuff for the community I live in. Right? So things I do, like, rust is a hot topic within automotive.
Joe Speed:It's what everyone is trying to get to, and you guys are already there. So I think for in a lot of ways, not just, like, physical hardware that you guys provide, but the kind of support and insight and upstream contributions that you all make, I think you can very much be like a a Sherpa for a lot of these automotive technology companies.
Alex:Are there any specific configurations or adjustments that you make to make sure everything's running at peak?
Joe Speed:In terms of the kind of configurations, it's kind of funny. Like, what I've observed is so you know in the market, you expect this bell curve distribution. Right? But what I've seen is in this particular market, for the things that we do, it's like an inverse bell curve. Okay?
Joe Speed:So I see a ton of demand for, like, how cheap can I get into this? How small? How low power? What's a minimal configuration? So I see a lot of demand for that.
Joe Speed:And I see a lot of demand for at the top end of things. Like, I want all the bells and whistles. I want all the cores, all the memory, all the networking. You know, I want the biggest, fattest, most expensive GPU that you can fit physically fit into it and cool. And that's an interesting, fascinating thing.
Joe Speed:Something else that's pretty interesting is I've seen, like, within the home lab or hobbyist community, it was that demand for kind of the low end, like, for us, cores are plentiful and cheap. Right? We give a large number of energy efficient cores, fixed frequency, large private cache. As you scale it, the last core gives the same performance as 1st core. So, you know, we make 32 core products, but as a practical matter, most people start with our 64 core.
Joe Speed:And so what I've seen in the HomeLaber community is that, you know, demand for the 64 core, desktops, dev kits, all of these things, compared to the 120 cores, like 2 to 1. You know? And you're like, okay. This sounds about right. But something's really happened here in the past month is that the demand has flipped and the demand for 128 core desktops, dev kits, all this is double what it is for the 64 core.
Joe Speed:So, so something's going on and, and it's not all home lab. Like I, I was just with, one of the biggest cloud companies in the world, and it turned out that they had grabbed these boards and built a half dozen, workstations for their mobile software team. And, you know, and they're all, like, top end, top spec. So there there's a lot happening that is not very obvious, and they went and, you know, just got that stuff online. So interesting.
Joe Speed:So, definitely, you know, seeing a lot of memory. Like anyone working on the LLMs, large language models, and these kinds of things, they're looking for, you know, terabyte of memory, half terabyte of memory. You've got people like, Jeff Geerling and others where they're using Ampere in their home lab NAS. And so it's, you know, a lot of memory. And there's friends of ours just launched a product that it's, you know, a portable compute with a petabyte of flash storage.
Joe Speed:So that cost all the dollars. And then the NVIDIA GPU. So, you know, there's some really nice ones like the a 400. If you just wanna drive a bunch of displays and you're using, you know, CLion and v and Versus Studio and all these kinds of things, that's perfectly good for that. And that's like $150.
Joe Speed:But at the other end, we're seeing people working on, content and creatives and other kinds of things where, you know, they're going all in with, you know, even multiple RTX 6000 ADAS, which very pleased that you guys can support that as well.
Emma:So you mentioned people were, just kinda buying stuff offline and putting it all together. Well, system 76 is trying to offer that as a single solution, a a prebuilt solution. What kind of value do you see in that, and what companies do you predict would be using this prebuilt solution?
Joe Speed:You've got the home labors and people are pride quite adept at hardware, and they love to build things just because it's fun. Okay? There's also people who are ARM software developers. They just wanna get about their doing what they wanna do, and they're building them out of necessity. There's a big pent up demand for these things.
Joe Speed:And so there will be people that continue to build these things and contribute and, you know, work on firmware and all these other things. And and that's an important part of the ecosystem. And, honestly, we can learn and get a lot of insights from that. You know, I ran a home lab arm builder contest where, you know, we could take a look and reward people that are doing really interesting things. The the the big demand you look at, you know, it's already public that tier 4, which is a a famous Japanese autonomous driving company, they're backed by, like, you know, Isuzu, Suzuki, Mitsubishi, people like that.
Joe Speed:They're doing stuff with Kawasaki, all of these. A lot of autonomous buses, a lot of, autonomous movement of goods, like in factory complexes. So they already use your product. There's also, you know, there's a Japanese automaker, big Japanese automaker who is, in a lot of ways, you know, commissioned for I I wouldn't say that Thilo Astro wouldn't exist without them, but it certainly would not exist now at this time. Okay?
Joe Speed:So they commissioned the development of this product for their autonomous driving team. And I think some of that might become public here pretty soon, but it's not yet public. We'll see if it's public by the time this podcast hits. And so, you know, you're seeing a big demand and uptake in a few areas. So really, anyone who's doing ARM software development, anyone who's end product run time is ARM.
Joe Speed:And the automakers are a good example of that. Right? So the vehicle, you know, the vehicles are in mid flight moving their electronic compute architecture from having 100 of little cheap ECUs, so microprocessors, and MCUs, microcontrollers, running simple software to a architecture, like when they talk about software defined vehicle, they really mean cloud native cars. So think of this. In a software defined vehicle, what you have is instead of a hundreds of these little computers running a single piece of software, you have a few or ultimately one computer that is larger, more powerful, multi core, many core with complicated, complex software.
Joe Speed:Okay? So think like, you know, virtualized, containerized, like running things like QNXRTOS and and, automotive grade Linux cockpit and Android Automotive Infotainment, like all on one computer in the car. So it's this heterogeneous compute, mixed workloads, you need this freedom of interference, and all of it's ARM based. But you can't develop and test your software on that kind of hardware. You'd lose your mind.
Joe Speed:So most vehicle computers like Raspberry Pi class devices and, you know, as you know, like, let's think of how many hours to build Linux on a Raspberry Pi. Okay? So if you had to develop on that for a living, you'd go nuts. It would be too slow. So you've gotta be able to develop and test at scale and deliver at scale.
Joe Speed:And this is a real challenge for the automakers. You know, this is fundamentally, like, software delivering quality is at the root of why Volkswagen fired their CEO. This is a boardroom level topic at automakers. And so, you know, using Ampere, using, things like Thillio Astra on the desktop and system 76 Starling in the rack to be able to develop and test and deliver software at scale. Right?
Joe Speed:Being able to get the same silicon that automakers use today on clouds and put that on your desk, that's a really powerful thing. It's an incredibly pro productivity improving thing. And, you know, people say, oh, just do it all in the cloud. But, you know, there are some topics where doing it on prem has huge benefits and makes you know, like, if you're doing driver development, you're testing different kinds of hardware and cameras and sensors and drive by wire and things, you can't do that in the cloud. You can stub it out.
Joe Speed:You can do 90 something percent of your test, but you actually, at some point, you need physical hardware to do these things. If you're doing digital cockpits, infotainment, and instrument cluster, there's real value in having, you know, a dozen virtual head units running on your desktop with NVIDIA GPUs and being able to render it, capture it, stream it, share it with everyone in the office. That's huge. And, you know, and I think that's where a lot of the uptake's gonna be. Somebody that has exactly the same technical requirements and will use exactly the same hardware is people doing mobiles.
Joe Speed:Right? Mobile app development and testing at scale and all of these things. And so, you know, you look at the companies providing the core technologies for that, the mobile OSs and the people developing the apps, the people using the apps, the people concerned about the security of these apps, you know, all of these things, can be done on Thillio Astro.
Alex:What advantages do you enjoy about using, an Ampere processor in a desktop?
Joe Speed:There's people that kind of ascribe certain values to it. And for the cloud, it's really a matter of rack density and efficiency. Right? To make your cloud business work better and customers happier and be more productive and profitable and hit all your carbon green goals, the exercises you want more cores per rack and to use less power. So it's a density thing.
Joe Speed:Okay? Historically, a lot of the X a 6 is all about scale up. Like, can I make the cores bigger, hotter, faster, more powerful? Okay? With ARM, it's kinda more scaled out.
Joe Speed:So, you know, if I can fit a large number of energy efficient cores per rack, okay, that's good for the business, good for the environment, good for the bottom line. If these cores are fixed frequency, then they deliver predictable performance. If they have large private caches, then I don't have any of the hyper threading, impacts. And I can get good performance out of each of those cores. The and then if I can put lots of those cores per socket and put lots of sockets per rack, that's the density.
Joe Speed:So here's the thing for desktops. This is how this translates. Because it's so energy efficient, you know, think about this. You can take a 128 core, put it in the desktop, and at 2.6 gigahertz fully loaded, 124 watts. So that makes it easy to cool.
Joe Speed:It makes it good on your home power bill. It means that it makes it really easy to make it quiet. So now I can have Thylio. You know, I can get Threadripper class performance out of a Thylio and but it's super quiet and not using much power. And the other thing is so think about within an enclosure, pick a number.
Joe Speed:Let's say I want it to be 500 watts. Well, if my CPU is using less power, then that means I can have more power for all the other things. So I can put hotter GPUs, more GPUs, and still keep within that same thermal and power limit. So I think that's a really big thing. Also, you know, there are folks where they get sticker shock that, you know, CPUs in the cloud cost.
Joe Speed:CPUs in the cloud with GPUs is hella expensive. And so there is a lot of flight, not just in the home lab or in individual developers, but, like, corporations and r and d teams and autonomous driving companies who end up, like, shifting these things to the desktop and to racks in the office because, you know, they can rack and stack Ampere CPUs with NVIDIA GPUs all day long for a fraction what it costs to do that in the cloud. I think from general purpose compute, like just CPU, you know, there's Hatzner, Oracle. There's a lot of companies that can give you incredible value. They do a really nice job, really nice product.
Joe Speed:But there is something to be said where if I need to physically touch the hardware or I need GPUs, you know, there's not much that can beat that just putting that on your desk. Being able to do things like take a Thaleo Astra and spin up 32 virtual 4 core mobile phone SOCs or automotive ECUs, car computers, and be running tests in parallel, that has huge impact on your ability to to do more tests faster because you can parallelize it. And if you can do more testing faster, that's more turns of the wheel, more complete testing per day. So I move from once a week to once a night to per per pull request. I can do the full regression testing, you know.
Joe Speed:And that's just gonna be awesome for all of these people. So incredibly excited to be doing this with you all. And, it's gonna have a real impact on automotive quality, mobile quality, and, you know, for vehicles. This is stuff, you know, ultimately, like, it saves lives. Right?
Joe Speed:It gets better product to market faster. You know, you're gonna help with accelerate autonomous driving and democratize it so that more people can get into autonomous driving without having to front, you know, a $100,000,000 in data center GPU. So, yeah, it's genius. Mhmm.
Emma:So we've talked a lot about Thaleoastra, but there is a really hot topic, is kite surfing. We heard that you were a huge kite surfer, so we were curious what that's like and, if you have any cool stories for us.
Joe Speed:Yeah. So kite surfing's rather brilliant. So I grew up from the age of 12 or 13 windsurfing. So I did that for a long time. And kite surfing came along, and it's just brilliant.
Joe Speed:The first time I got to do it was in the Columbia River Gorge, Hood River, out at the event site on the sandbar. And, you know, I was on a 5 meter two line kite, so no deep hour. Right? Like, this is super dangerous stuff. And, and it was blowing, like, 30.
Joe Speed:And I went just tearing across the river, crash and burn, almost dying. Like, oh my god. I love this. This is the best thing to happen. And, so got way into it, met a girl in Florida.
Joe Speed:She went with me on a trip out to California, kite surfing at,
Alex:Rio
Joe Speed:Vista, Sherman Island, and, you know, jumped stupid high, came down wrong, just destroyed my knee. And, but, you know, there there's a bright side, which is after my surgery, she quit her job in Florida and came out and took care of me post surgery. So I got a wife out of the deal. So now I'm, like, married. I got kids.
Joe Speed:I got a family. Like, it's awesome. So totally worth it. Totally worth it. The kiting is genius.
Joe Speed:You know, the the cool kids, they've definitely moved over to a lot. There's a lot of wing foiling. Not quite sure if I'm up for that. I like my surfboard. I like just tossing up the kite and going out in the waves.
Joe Speed:I highly encourage people try it. If you wanna do it, buy a trainer, fly it for 10 hours, and then go take a lesson. Like, that's that's the secret tip for how to do this well. And if you wanna learn, there's no place better in the world than South Padre Island.
Emma:Okay. Well, thanks for that. I'm gonna have to give that a try for sure. Right on. Well, thanks so much, Jo.
Emma:We're excited to see what happens next. We have Britton and Tony here from System 76. Britton, what is your job at System 76?
Britain:Hey, Emma. So, I am a mechanical engineer over at System 76, and I'm responsible for pretty much all the mechanical design of the computer chassis and externals and pretty much the cooling systems for the, computers.
Emma:Awesome. And Tony, what do you do at System76?
Tony:I am the product manager at system 76. And so, I do a lot of cross functional work with basically every team at the company. And, for Astra specifically, I've been working with, Britain to develop Delta system.
Emma:Awesome. And that system that we're talking about is ThaleoAstra, which, has, Ampere and ARM, collaborating together, which is known for energy efficiency. So can you speak to any metrics that highlight the energy efficiency of the ThaleoAstra?
Tony:Yeah. So we've been doing benchmarking that, Joe has provided. And, with the Ampere scripts, we've been able to do a lot of phoronix testing, and it's performing really well over some of the more server grade CPUs. And it's really been I think it's topped out. We've seen that 230, 240 watts, which is a lot lower than we see some of the other higher end CPUs.
Tony:We're still doing a lot of benchmark testing. We're working with Ampere. They're sending new scripts and stuff over. So we're still testing, like, actual computer output through, like, a, you know, a power perspective. But so far, it's been, performing really well for how much power it uses.
Alex:What are some of the challenges that go into benchmarking for ARM?
Tony:For us specifically, it's, at least through my experience, it's been a kind of a software thing. Arm is a new platform for me to work on. So getting the software up and in a good place where, we can actually benchmark it efficiently has been a learning process, but, with Joe and, the engineers in Ampere, they've been doing a lot of the heavy lifting as far as getting a benchmark software ready. So, that's that's probably just been the kind of main challenge there.
Alex:Gotcha.
Tony:And then, and then Britton could probably speak more on, like, the cooling of it, because he he did a lot of thermal testing here and pushing the CPU to its limits. So
Britain:Right. Yeah. So on the thermal side of things, our initial testing, the CPU temp was a little bit higher than we wanted so we had to do a few different modifications for the cooling. So we made our CPU duct a little bit, larger, so it had a larger intake so that more airflow would get to the cooler and allow it to cool the CPU more efficiently. And we also made some modifications to the, rear exhaust fan, and the modifications allowed it to prevent, recirculation of hot air and make sure all the air exits the, rear of the chassis.
Britain:But after those changes, we were able to get the CPU down to a more, you know, reasonable temp during the the stress test.
Emma:Can you speak to how well the system handles, multithreaded tasks or high performance applications?
Tony:Yeah. Sure. We did a bunch of benchmarking through a Varonix test suite, and, there was a test in specific called Sysbench that, was just a multithreaded, general computational test. And, compared to the other CPUs that, Furanix tested it against, it actually performed in the 96 percentile. So that was actually really, really surprising how well it performed.
Tony:It also there was also a test, for computational fluid dynamics where it, performed in the 99th percentile.
Alex:So Oh, wow.
Tony:There, yeah, it's, there's some tests that it, even ray tracing, it was in the 94th percentile. So it's performing really well. And, some of these tests, that I was, not expecting to see. And again, we're still benchmarking and still testing the heck out of it. There'll be a lot more I'll we'll have a lot more data as we get through these tests and things like that.
Emma:I'm excited to see some results there.
Tony:We're getting ready to set up a system now. And like Joe was talking about before, setting up a system with emulation and running some of their tests and really seeing how well it performs versus an x86 system emulating ARM software. Since this is a new platform for me, I'm very interested to see how well it performs because ARM has a very, like, focused performance. And I'm just curious to see how it, it plays out.
Emma:Are there any other specific configurations or adjustments that you made besides the cooling that help ensure smoother performance, like, the type of RAM or, hard drive that you're using?
Tony:We've definitely been testing with all the DEMS populated as that helps with the performance since it's an 8 channel. As far as drives, nothing too specific there. We've been running with 60 our test system that we've been running in the factory has been using, 64 gig modules, which has given us plenty of memory to run tests. We actually just started running a test that, Joe and his team sent over running a bunch of VMs, and we just got the results in on that. And some of these things are software specific, as far as the versions and images we're using for a boom 2.
Tony:And those are things that are still currently being tested. So far, the performance is looking really good, and as we go further along and do more of these benchmarks and more of these specific tests, I expect the performance to be even better than, at least what I expected.
Alex:And as far as the cooling system goes, changes did you have to make to accommodate for the Ampere chip as opposed to what we do in Thales with Intel or AMD.
Britain:We chose a larger cooler than than typical, so that, that itself required some modifications for just the the CPU ducting, and that allowed the cooling of the system to be a lot more efficient, and you know stay at a lower operating temperature. Like I mentioned before, that's like main part to really accommodate the CPU, and everything else is really accommodating for the larger cooler, and, with the larger cooler there's more like heat transfer, and therefore we need a little bit better airflow along with that. So that required a more efficient ducting system for the rear fan to prevent any kind of like air recirculation and stuff like that. So they all kind of work hand in hand.
Emma:Cool. Is there, any anything you wanna add about Thaleo Astro that you're most excited about or that, you think is the most interesting feature of the product?
Tony:One of the things we do really well is we have, really powerful workstations, and we put a lot of work into optimizing them, and we continually put work into them. So having a workstation, you know, a new workstation like Arm to add to the collection of what we already offer is pretty exciting. And especially, working in a new platform because I, I like doing new stuff, you know, and, having a workstation where we've been able to keep the size kind of, down because it's essentially a a Mira chassis is also is also interesting to have a workstation of that size. And, it'll be it'll be interesting also to just go through as we iterate and then as we improve on the system going forward and, in watching the kind of things that Britton comes up with to, make improvements. We're already, been looking into, memory cooling, and so we've been experimenting with different things like that there.
Tony:So, you know, just constant improvements and iterations, what I'm excited about. Cool.
Alex:Well, that's that's all for me.
Joe Speed:3, 2, 1.
Crew Communicator:This has been the system 76 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. Intransmission.