Expanding the very small market of motherboards that
don’t use Intel or AMD x86, Raptor Engineering have just released a new
motherboard in the form of the Blackbird designed for an IBM Power9 CPU. The
new motherboard is priced at around US$ 800 but you can also add in a four core
CPU for US$ 1200.
The Blackbird mainboard features dual DDR4 ECC DIMM
slots, one PCI Express 4.0 x16 slot, one PCI Express 4.0 x8 slot, dual Gigabit
Ethernet ports, 4 x SATA 3.0 ports, 4 x USB 3.0 ports, 1 x USB 2.0 port, and an
HDMI display output. Although the motherboard is still expensive in hardware
terms the new motherboard offers a significant reduction in price from the US$ 3700 motherboard previously released by Raptor Engineering.
