Initial Blackbird specifications announced

Raptor in a series of tweets has made initial announcements about the specifications of the new Blackbird system. As expected, it is a single POWER9 CPU system with two ECC DDR4 2.666GHz RAM slots, two PCI slots (x16 and x8), onboard HDMI via an AST2500, same NIC as the Talos II, 4x onboard SATA and 5.1 sound with S/PDIF out. Combined with an estimated under 100W power consumption (with a 4-core CPU), which is very welcome, and you have a system that can live in many more settings than a desktop workstation. Maximum core count was not yet announced, but our guess is that the Blackbird will top out at 8, nor a price.

We're planning to preorder one of these and we'll review it (and compare it with the big T2) here.

Update: A Raptor Wiki entry is now available which seems to confirm that 8 cores is the limit on this machine "due to power delivery limitations." In addition, 8-core systems have a slightly slower all-core turbo frequency. Raptor says on Twitter they "should in fact be able to support the full 8 core device at listed clock speeds."