#Thelio Major

[hackernewsrobot]

System76 Thelio Major Powered by AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7000 Series Performance

https://www.phoronix.com/review/system76-thelio-threadripper-2024

[system76]

Win a $10,000 Thelio Major Workstation!

The computer and operating system are the most powerful tools in existence. The Launch into Learning season encourages STEM and creative professionals like you to hone their craft, learn a new skill, or make something they’re proud to share.

This year, we’re empowering one lucky user with a $10,000 Thelio Major workstation. The complete package includes a Launch keyboard, an MX Master 3 wireless mouse, a 27” 1440p IPS display, and a decked-out Thelio Major.

To enter the giveaway, retweet our contest tweet and read our terms and conditions.

The Launch Keyboard

The Launch configurable keyboard is fully customizable and engineered for comfort and efficiency. Remap your layout in the Keyboard Configurator, swap keycaps and accent colors, use up to four layers, and transfer data at high speeds through the USB hub. By personalizing your workflow, Launch propels users forward at max velocity. That’s max for Maximillion, a measurement equal to one million maximums.

Thelio Major

Thelio Major is a high-end desktop (HEDT) that’s thermally engineered to ensure components perform to their fullest potential. For the Launch into Learning giveaway, one randomly selected winner will receive a system with an AMD Threadripper 3970X processor, 64GB of RAM, 2TB of fast PCIe 4.0 storage, and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 GPU. Thelio Major does not skimp on power. Or beauty.

Retweet this post before September 30th, 2021 to enter System76’s Launch into Learning Twitter giveaway. Good luck!

[arthurhwalker]

System 76′s Pop!_OS

I've been meaning to write something up about System 76's Pop!_OS. I've been slowly putting things together for my Creative FOSS Tumblr as I find the time, and this will probably influence that. The Linux landscape was disrupted recently with IBM's purchase of Red Hat, and perhaps Linus Torvald's temporary departure. I really don't know, but I'm one of a few (perhaps many) that has taken an escape pod from the Canonical’s Ubuntu Mothership to explore the mysterious world of Pop!_OS.

Pop!_OS is System76's own spin on Ubuntu for their line of Linux specific laptops and desktops. For creatives packing a rig with dedicated graphics, the operating system has a lot to offer. It has a version with Nvidia Graphics and GPU switching baked in, one less thing to battle in the BIOS and then a Terminal window. Power management, out of the box, is very intuitive and works well on the various machines I've tried it on.

Pop!_OS also has a Do Not Disturb feature built into the notification pane. This was a major pain point with Windows 10, being in deep creative flow, and the operating system desperately needing to play with itself, or notify me of something arbitrary. It was like trying to concentrate on work with a bored child doing everything they can to get your attention. I could turn everything off, until the next unprompted update, where Microsoft would change the structure of one of the many superfluous settings menus throughout the bloated corpse that is their Windows 10 "Service".

Wow, I'm really angry about all that. On to my point. Pop!_OS has a DnD switch, up front, that makes the Operating System quiet, no, that's not right... quieter. Yay. Seriously, tears of joy.

Okay, what really appeals to me as a creative about Pop!_OS is the aesthetics. It's like someone took Ubuntu and corked all the squeaky bits, rounded off the sharp corners, turned down the garish lights. I just want to listen to Tord Gustavsen Trio and write about sleepy things when I use Pop!_OS. It's just nicer to use, pen stylus input working out of the box, crisp and accurate.

Pop!_OS recently added Lutris, and GameHub as options beside Steam. This move brings closer the day when I won't have to boot or maintain a Windows 10 partition for certain games. I'm ecstatic about the prospect of this, and hope it is a trend that catches on. I don't hate or even dislike Microsoft, but I'd like to see the market share of Windows drop enough that they start making it not suck as hard as it currently does.

System 76 has a really good set of support pages. I've managed to find something for all my little niggles and wants. Legacy Status Icons!

I've had a couple of issues with Pop!_OS, getting an external monitor to work with my X1 Extreme, and SD card readers to work on my X1 Carbon, and P40 Yoga. System76's Pop Chat support saved the day in both instances. Folks there didn't exactly know the answer, because I'm not using System 76's hardware, but they were able to guide me toward finding solutions that worked, building my knowledge of Linux along the way.

That is huge. The Lenovo Thinkpad tends to be my primary buy, mainly because I know if the thing catches fire, they'll just handle it for me. Seeing how responsive System 76 on both their dedicated support channel and social media definitely gives me that same feeling. I haven't bought any of their hardware, yet, but I wouldn't be anxious about the purchase in the same way I would be with some other, arguably bigger and more established manufacturers.

Also, their Thelio desktops look amazing. Specs and options aside, they are nice enough looking you wouldn't want to just hide them away like some towers. Also, you can get one set up purely with AMD processors and dedicated graphics. No Intel, no Windows 10, just AMD and Pop!_OS or Ubuntu. If that contrast makes you take notice, then you know exactly why that combination would be appealing.

A lot of thought and work went into the Thelio Desktops, feeling something like a labor of love, and a love letter to the Linux Community.

For my work use case, among their portable offerings, the powerfully spec'd Oryx Pro looks to be the closest thing. I reached out to them about the display, and found it probably isn't good enough for doing print work, photography, and similar. For web work, and creating most digital content, I think it'd be just fine.

For my personal use case, the Galago Pro looks perfect. For someone that wants a personal computer, for core computing tasks, running Linux, this looks ideal. Every specification down to the battery, weight, and display type looks great. I wouldn't even be afraid of the HiDPI upgrade option because it is still a matte display, and Pop!_OS handles scaling really well. Best of all, it isn't being sold at a boutique computer price, being very competitive for the money.

That said, you can still get support and rapid assembly services as it is essentially a custom rig. Princess mode without the price tag, in my humble opinion.

System 76 Resources

Site Pop!_Docs Pop! Chat Reddit Twitter

[illuminarch]

System76 cria super PC Thelio Linux

System76 cria super PC Thelio Linux

Todas as outras CPUs de desktop ficaram para trás após o grande lançamento anunciado pela System 76. Estamos falando do mais poderoso computador rodando Linux já construído.   O novo Ryzen Threadripper 3990X de 64 núcleos da AMD, que agora pode ser carregado no PC Thelio Major Linux, recentemente planejado e aprimorado, da System76.

System76 aprimora PC Thelio Linux

O lançamento de sistemas…

[yourgamecheats]

As AMD launch the monster 3990X CPU, System76 offer it up with their stylish Thelio Major

As AMD launch the monster 3990X CPU, System76 offer it up with their stylish Thelio Major

Tags: Hardware, AMD

Today, AMD officially made the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X available as a seriously high-end desktop processor. Along with that, System76 jumped in right away to give it as an option on their powerful Thelio Major.

Coming with a huge amount of cores, the Threadripper 3990X certainly isn’t cheap in the region of around $3,990/£3,696. For that you get a lot of everything though…

[gozealouscloudcollection]

System76宣布Thelio台式機現支持第三代AMD Ryzen處理器

訪問:

京東商城

目前System76共推出了三款型號，不過只有兩款Thelio台式機可配置使用AMD Ryzen CPU，包括4核8線程的第二代AMD Ryzen 5、6核12線程的第三代AMD Ryzen 5 3600X、8核16線程的第三代AMD Ryzen 7 3800X、12核24線程的第三代AMD Ryzen 9 3900X以及AMD Ryzen Threadripper處理器。

三款型號中最便宜的是Thelio系列，999美元起售，可以配置第二代/第三代AMD Ryzen或者英特爾酷睿處理器，最高32GB的內存，最高24TB的存儲，最高6GB的AMD Radeon或Nvidia GeForce��卡，或集成Intel HD顯卡。

第二個型號為Thelio Major���可以配置AMD Ryzen Threadripper或Intel Core-X CPU，高達128GB的內存，高達46TB的存儲空間，最多4個GPU，價格方面為2,549美元起售。 AMD Ryzen Threadripper CPU提供的是1900X，2920X，2950X，2970WX和功能強大的2990WX，提供不少於32個內核和64個線程的澎湃性能輸出。

最後是 Thelio Massive，它只搭載雙英特爾Xeon處理器，能夠幫助你完成最嚴苛最繁重的任務。所有型號都可以選擇Pop！ _ OS 19.04或Ubuntu 18.04 LTS。

訪問：https://system76.com/desktops

.

from System76宣布Thelio台式機現支持第三代AMD Ryzen處理器 via KKNEWS

[digitaliveworld]

Thelio Major now available with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X., Hacker News (e) a="" href="http: // system . com... https://digitalive.alichachu.best/thelio-major-now-available-with-amd-ryzen-threadripper-3990x-hacker-news/?feed_id=49534&_unique_id=5e3ea28caca69&utm_source=Tumblr&utm_medium=admin&utm_campaign=FS%20Poster

[tqvcancun]

El nuevo Thelio Major de System76 incluye AMD Threadripper de tercera generación

El conocido fabricante estadounidense de ordenadores Linux System76 ha lanzado recientemente su nueva línea de ordenadores de sobremesa Thelio Major, unos potentes workstations de alta gama (HEDT) que incluyen la tercera generación de AMD Threadripper como procesadores.

Thelio Major permite seleccionar como procesador entre los modelos 3960X, con 3,8GHz de frecuencia base, 4,5GHz de frecuencia turbo, 24 núcleos y 48 hilos; 3970X, con 3,7GHz de frecuencia base, 4,5GHz de frecuencia turbo, 32 núcleos y 64 hilos; y 3990X, con 2,9GHz de frecuencia base, 4,3GHz de frecuencia turbo, 64 núcleos y 128 hilos.

A nivel de RAM, partiendo de 16GB, permite añadir hasta 256GB de DDR4 a una frecuencia de 3.000MHz y en disposición Quad Channel, mientras que a nivel de almacenamiento soporta hasta 46 terabytes mediante combinaciones de SDD NVMe y discos duros de 2,5 pulgadas. En lo que respecta a las gráficas permite incluir hasta dos GPU que pueden ser de NVIDIA o AMD. Aquí System76 pone a disposición los modelos Radeon RX 550, Radeon RX 5700, Radeon RX 5700 XT, GeForce RTX 2060 Super, GeForce RTX 2070 Super, GeForce RTX 2080 Super, GeForce RTX 2080 Ti y RTX Titan. Por lo demás nos encontramos con las conexiones típicas de cualquier ordenador de sobremesa, pudiéndose destacar el soporte de Wi-Fi y Bluetooth, que no son muy comunes en este tipo de equipos.

El Thelio Major tiene dos puntos a destacar frente a otros equipos de formato similar. Primero, su peculiar diseño, que lo hace perecer más un mueble que una computadora. Segundo, su sistema de refrigeración por aire, que según el fabricante está diseñado para evitar el temido thermal throttling cuando se haga uso de los 64 núcleos físicos del AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X.

El precio base del Thelio Major de System76 es de 3.798 dólares estadounidenses. Es importante tener en cuenta que este no es un equipo dirigido a los usuarios finales, ni siquiera a los gamers, sino más bien a profesionales de la edición de vídeo y el tratamiento avanzado de gráficos 3D, por nombrar dos de los sectores a los que realmente va dirigido. Dicho de otra manera, es una computadora orientada al público profesional, aunque al que le sobre dinero para comprobar cuántas imágenes por segundo obtiene con el primer Half-Life también puede comprarla.

Fuente: MuyLinux

[resham-stuff]

Sunglasses Market Revenue, Price & Growth Rate | Forecast To 2026

Data Bridge Market Research has announced the addition of new statistical data titled as, Sunglasses Market. It is scrutinized with various aspects of the existing industries such as types, size, application, and end-users.

Global Sunglasses Market is expected to rise from its initial estimated value of USD 17987 million in 2018 to an estimated value of USD 31487.42 million by 2026, registering a CAGR of 7.25% in the forecast period of 2019-2026.

Click Here to Get Sample Report Of “Sunglasses” Market

The Major players profiled in this report include De Rigo Vision S.p.A., Essilor, Fielmann, Lanvin, LUXOTTICA GROUP P.IVA 10182640150, LVMH, Marchon Eyewear, Inc., Marcolin SpA., Maui Jim, Safilo Group S.p.A.,   Alexander McQueen, Michael Kors, Pivothead, Specsavers, FASTRACK LTD., CHARMANT Group, De Rigo Vision S.p.A., XIAMEN ASA SUNGLASSES CO., LTD., Kyboe.

Competitive Rivalry-: The Sunglasses report incorporates the detailed analysis of the leading organizations and their thought process and what are the methodologies they are adopting to maintain their brand image in this market. The report aides the new bees to understand the level of competition that they need to fight for to strengthen their roots in this competitive market.

Conducts Overall SUNGLASSES Market Segmentation: This knowledgeable market research report offers lucrative opportunities by breaking down complex market data into segments on the basis of –

By Lens Material (Glass, Plastic, CR-39, Polycarbonate, Polyurethane, Others), Product (Polarized, Non- Polarized, Mirrored, Others),

End- User (Men, Women, Unisex, Children), Distribution Channel (Offline Retail Stores, Online Retail Stores),

Type (Aviator, Browline, Oversized, Shutter Shades, Teashades, Wayfarer, Wrap-Around, Others),

Frame Material (Pc, Wooden, Acetate, Alloy, Others)

The SUNGLASSES report covers market shares for global, Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and South America. The analysis of this report has been used to examine various segments that are relied upon to witness the quickest development based on the estimated forecast frame.

In December 2018, Fred announced the launch of their new collection of eight eyewear style which is designed in collaboration with Thelios. The main aim is to provide special designed trendy eyewear to the people. This collaboration has led to collection of eyeglasses with the signature braided marine cable of the Force 10 bracelet on the temples.

Read Complete Details with TOC, CLICK HERE      

[system76]

Thelio Massive at the Lab: An interview with Luca Della Santina

Every now and then we like to check in on our customers to find out about what coolness they’re up to. This week, we sat down with Luca Della Santina, an assistant professor at UCSF in the Department of Ophthalmology, to see what he and his Thelio Massives are discovering at the lab.

What kind of work goes on in the Department of Ophthalmology?

Everything we do is focused on the eye and on vision. I am also part of the Bakar Institute, which is a computational institute specializing in machine learning and deep learning applied to health sciences. The lab that I run is divided between working on computational approaches, mainly image analysis.

What projects are you working on right now?

One major current project is detecting an infection of the eye called trachoma. Trachoma is an infection that affects the inside of the eyelid. It usually occurs in countries below the tropics, and it’s a major cause of blindness for people across the world—except for in wealthy countries like the US where it’s very rare. Eliminating it elsewhere is a major goal of the World Health Organization. Africa, South America, Asia and Oceania still have many cases, so we’re taking photographs of the afflicted eyelid to look at the sites where bacteria has infected the eye. Then we use deep learning to detect it automatically to help public health experts decide which communities will require antibiotic treatment.

We’re also taking images of neurons in the eyes and map the connection between them, called synapses, to study how degenerative diseases of the eye such as glaucoma can alter the wires between neurons. Knowing which neurons are the most susceptible to disease will shine a light on new and more sensitive tests to catch these blinding diseases before they can actually cause major vision loss. This type of research generates really large data sets, in which each image is large many gigabytes and for which the analysis is very computationally intensive, both for the GPU and the CPU.

How long have you been using System76 workstations for your projects?

We started to use System76 systems two years ago, give or take. It was part of setting up my computational lab. One of the goals was to have a completely open a stack, and your workstations were an integral part of this strategy.

What is the computational stack you’re using?

We have the Thelio Massives configured for deep learning and for processing large image data. One of the systems has NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000 GPUs for training larger models than we usually do. In the other system, we have it configured with dual CPUs and dual NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Tis. The reason for that is that some of the computational work is being developed with parallel computing, both on GPUs and CPUs. The more cores and the more CPUs we get this on, the better.

How do you balance workloads between the CPUs and GPUs?

Strictly for the projects I’m on, they’re each about as important. All of the machine learning runs off the GPU right now, but all of the basic image analysis and parallel computing actually works off the CPU. The reason for the latter is there’s no significant advantage to push that work onto a GPU. There are a few algorithms that we cannot parallelize on the GPU because of the way they are designed, and one of these is actually pretty fundamental in the way we segment images, so if we put it on the GPU there is not much increase in speed because we cannot push it onto every core of the GPU. For most of it, we need the raw power of the CPU.

What were the determining factors when you decided to go with System76 and our Thelio Massives?

A few things. We wanted a system that was designed to run Linux from its foundations. There are not a lot of systems like yours, so that was a major factor in our choice. We also wanted a system that we could expand easily in the future, and we found out that the Thelio Massive has has great expandability.

The most important factor for me was being able to double or triple the RAM somewhere down the line, and maybe have another couple of GPUs in the system. Having storage options is useful for us because we may generate a dataset and on a single 4TB hard drive, so the ability to just pop out and pop in hard drives is very easy. It’s actually huge for us. I ended up buying a bunch of 5TB drives and just packed them in. Most of the small stuff we just run off of the NVMe drive, and that’s much better than the rest of the storage we have.

I really enjoy how quiet these machines are! I can testify that we’re sharing the same room with another computer from a different vendor with similar components, and it’s about 10 times louder than the Thelio Massives.

What operating system do you use?

So far we’ve been keeping both Thelio Massives on Pop!_OS. The other workstation we have in the lab is either Ubuntu or Windows.

How has Pop!_OS been for you?

The software pipeline we use runs out of the box pretty well on Pop!_OS, so that’s not been an issue so far. I appreciate that you guys have full disk encryption out of the box.

We’ve also heard you’re thinking about buying a Lemur Pro. What made you consider that machine?

I need something that’s light that I can bring around with me. It’s also got a good number of ports, which lately has been hard to find on a laptop, which frees me up from having to carry dongles on my trips. I can also configure it up to 40GB of RAM, and I need at least 32GB, so that’s perfect for me.

Would you like to share how System76 has improved workflow for you and your organization? Contact myriah@system76.com to set up an interview!

[alaingonza]

System76’s Linux-Powered Thelio Desktops Now Available with AMD Ryzen Gen 3 CPUs

System76, the US-based maker of powerful Linux computers, announced on Twitter that its Thelio desktop line-up can now be configured with 3rd-generation AMD Ryzen processors.

System76's Thelio line-up offers customers out-of-this-world handcrafted desktop systems powered by the company's in-house developed Pop!_OS Linux operating system or Canonical's Ubuntu Linux, and ships with state-of-the-art hardware components that make your Linux computing experience more enjoyable.

Available in three models, only two of the Thelio desktops can now be configured with AMD Ryzen CPUs, including the 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen 5 with 5 core and 8 threads, 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen 5 3600X with 6 cores and 12 threads, 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen 7 3800X with 8 core and 16 threads, 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen 9 3900X with 12 Cores and 24 threads, AMD Ryzen Threadripper CPUs.

Thelio and Thelio Major models now ship with AMD Ryzen CPUs

The cheapest of them all is Thelio, whose price starts from $999 ... (read more)

from Softpedia News / Linux https://news.softpedia.com/news/system76-s-linux-powered-thelio-desktops-now-available-with-amd-ryzen-gen-3-cpus-526673.shtml

The following blog article System76’s Linux-Powered Thelio Desktops Now Available with AMD Ryzen Gen 3 CPUs was first published to www.alaingonza.com

from https://alaingonza.com/2019/07/09/system76s-linux-powered-thelio-desktops-now-available-with-amd-ryzen-gen-3-cpus-2/

[johanlouwers]

System76 Announces American-Made Desktop PC with Open-Source Parts

by Bryan Lunduke

Early in 2017—nearly two years ago—System76 invited me, and a handful of others, out to its Denver headquarters for a sneak peek at something new they'd been working on.

We were ushered into a windowless, underground meeting room. Our phones and cameras confiscated. Seriously. Every word of that is true. We were sworn to total and complete secrecy. Assumedly under penalty of extreme death...though that part was, technically, never stated.

Once the head honcho of System76, Carl Richell, was satisfied that the room was secure and free from bugs, the presentation began.

System76 told us the company was building its own desktop computers. Ones that it designed themselves. From-scratch cases. With wood. And inlaid metal. What's more, these designs would be open. All built right there in Denver, Colorado.

We were intrigued.

Then they showed them to us, and we darn near lost our minds. They were gorgeous. We all wanted them.

But they were not ready yet. This was early on in the design and engineering, and they were looking for feedback—to make sure System76 was on the right track.

They were.

Flash-forward to today (November 1,��2018), and these Linux-powered, made in America desktop machines are finally being unveiled to the world as the Thelio line (which they've been teasing for several weeks with a series of sci-fi themed stories).

The Thelio comes in three sizes:

Thelio (aka "small") — max 32GB RAM, 24TB storage.

Thelio Major (aka "medium") — max 128GB RAM, 46TB storage.

Thelio Massive (aka "large") — max 768GB RAM, 86TB storage.

All three sport the same basic look: part black metal, part wood (with either maple or walnut options) with rounded side edges. The cases open with a single slide up of the outer housing, with easy swapping of components. Lots of nice little touches, like a spot for in-case storage of screws that can be used in securing drives.

In an awesomely nerdy touch, the rear exhaust grill shows the alignment of planets in the solar system...at UNIX Epoch time. Also known as January 1, 1970. A Thursday.

Go to Full Article

https://ift.tt/2Q8pYAh via @johanlouwers . follow me also on twitter

[system76]

Behind the Scenes of System76: Industrial Design

Since moving into a factory space in 2018, System76 has delved deeper and deeper into manufacturing hardware in-house. Three years later, we’ve introduced five Thelio desktops, fine-tuned the hardware, developed our fully configurable Launch keyboard, and optimized our production processes. Helming the design process is Mechanical Engineer John Grano, who wears a number of different hats here. We sat down with John this week to discuss industrial design and the team behind our beautiful open source hardware.

How would you describe industrial design for people unfamiliar with the term?

To me, industrial design is basically the art of making something into a usable product. In industrial design, you have to balance looks and function, and that drives your form. It’s kind of like hardware UX in that it’s really important to have the right feel. If you can make the system connect better with people, they’ll like it more. Adding that softness we do with Thelio, like slightly rounded edges and darker wood, it makes it a little more approachable to have a semi-natural looking system and not something that’s blinking at you with red lights all the time.

System76 itself is a group of hardcore programmers and people that are really into Linux, but I think the idea of trying to democratize Linux is extremely important. If you can create something that doesn’t have that robotic aesthetic, it will provide people with something that feels more familiar and usable. No one really wants to go sit in a car that looks like a square with wheels on it. They want something that makes them feel something, maybe openness or comfort, when they’re in it.

What inspired you to get into mechanical engineering, and how did you end up at System76?

The way my brain works lends itself well to engineering, for better or for worse. There’s a lot of really solid engineers who don’t have much creativity, and then there are a lot of people who have great creative ability, but can’t do math. I kind of fluctuate in the middle; I wouldn’t say I’m the best at math or the most creative person in the entire world, but I have enough of each that the combination pushed me towards mechanical engineering. I like working with my hands, and it’s more of a study of how things work in the real world versus computer science, which is a purely digital and nontangible practice.

During school I worked mainly as a bike mechanic, and that helped me to think about how to build things better. That led me to my first internship at a bike company working in a wind tunnel, which was really fun. Realizing that I could probably never get a job there—or at least one that would pay me enough to live—I started working at an environmental engineering company, where I prototyped scientific sampling systems for R&D that would process materials with all these gasses at really high heat and tried not to die. It was kind of fun making these large-scale systems that were basically just gigantic science experiments, but I didn’t really have the creative outlet I wanted in terms of making something that looks good.

One of the main things that drew me to System76 was being able to have a solid influence on what tools we were able to use and how we were going to push the design. In the past three years, it’s pretty wild to see what we’ve been able to accomplish coming from a completely empty warehouse to being able to crank out parts.

I had also previously, while working at these scientific instrument companies, been working with a local company to design and develop a cargo bicycle, so I had that experience as well in terms of consumer product development with overseas manufacturing. I think that helped get me in the door here.

Let’s talk a bit about your team. Who do you collaborate with on a typical day?

It’s a very small team and everyone does a lot. I pretty much lead the mechanical engineering team slash design team...slash manufacturing team. Being a small company, we are all wearing a bunch of different hats. Aside from doing the initial design work on all of our Thelio desktops and the Launch keyboard, I also program our laser-punch machine and our brake press and run through all of the design for manufacturing hang ups that show up. Those changes tend to be a result of our current tools, and internal capabilities.

Crystal came on last August as our first CNC Machinist. She heads up all of the machining, trains our operators, makes sure our parts are coming out in a nice clean fashion, and has done a lot of work on minimizing machine time and maximizing the parts we can get out. She also provides really great feedback on what's possible and what kind of special fixtures or tools we'll need to make for a specific part. Around the same time we picked up our first Haas 3-axis CNC mill to start working on the Launch project. That led to some other opportunities to make parts for Thelio and improve the feel of some of the parts that we were pumping out.

We just hired Cary, who came from a similar background as me in consumer product development, as well as low-scale scientific machine development. He’s going to help build manufacturing tools for us, and he’s only been here now for two or three weeks. Going forward, Cary will be heading up the Thelio line long-term, and I’ll be moving to some interesting R&D work.

And Zooey?

Zooey doesn’t really do much. She just kind of sits there and waits for people to feed her their lunch. I take her out for walks during the day so she can get away from everyone petting her. She doesn’t like when they do that.

What was the R&D process like for Launch?

Launch is a less complicated product in that we don’t have to deal with things like cooling. Even dropping a PCB into aluminum housing deals with multiple processes, like using the laser and CNC machine. This was a start to looking at those processes to see how much time it takes to produce parts, the costs going into making them, and monitoring the cutting quality. You have to be familiar with the machines and know what you’re looking for when you see a tool going dull.

We first let the software experts do their thing and optimize a layout they wanted for their programming life. Then I was given that template, built a couple of sheet metal chassis that we wired up to test that layout, and made a bunch of little changes to that to get that right secret sauce for our keyboard-centric workflow in Pop!_OS. Once we got a sheet metal product that we were sure was going to be usable, we decided officially that we were going to pursue making a keyboard. That came with a whole new set of manufacturing requirements that we would have to look into.

We spent a ton of time working on pocket profile. When you look at a Launch, you’ll see that it’s not a perfect rectangle. That’s because when you’re using a mill, you have a round tool, so you can go through and get close to a pretty small radius on the corner, but you can never make it exact. If we wanted to get a very small, tight pocket, we’d have to use a very small cutter that takes an extremely long period of time.

We’re taking raw billet, which are these huge 12-foot-long sticks of aluminum that we cut down to get our final product. We went with a rounded rectangle so that we could use our cutter and decrease the overall time to machine that part. There was a lot of work in that and making sure the pockets were all 13.95mm versus 13.9mm versus 14.1mm.

We also did a lot of R&D on how we go about putting the angle bar on. Magnetic assembly seemed to be a good idea. We went from trying to glue magnets in to doing what's called press fitting. The bars come right out of powder coating while they’re nice and warm, when the aluminum is slightly larger than when it cools down. Those magnets aren’t actually adhered to anything in the bars; they’re squeezed in nice and tight from the aluminum cooling and contracting around them. That’s called a press fit, and doing that makes the process faster and less expensive.

It’s similar with the bottoms of Launch; we have steel plates that we press fit into that part as opposed to gluing or screwing, but that we do before powder coating; steel rusts, and we don’t want someone opening up their keyboard in a year and finding a little bit of rust floating underneath their super high-end PCB. So we do that, sand it down, use our media blaster to clean off the surface from the tool paths you see from the mill, and then we powder coat it through and through.

Word on the Denver streets is that Thelio Major is getting a redesign soon. What does that entail?

We’re bringing Thelio Major a lot more in line with Thelio Mega in terms of a different PCI mount for graphics cards, because we know that’s been a pain point for a lot of our users. We want to provide a little bit more robust installation for these graphics cards, which continue to increase in size and weight. The NVIDIA 3000-series cards are almost a pound heavier in some instances, and that’s a lot of weight to be shipping across the country.

We also want to continue to make Thelio Major cooler and quieter when it’s running with these new GPUs. Our new brake press allows us to make radius bends on parts, so we’re starting to run through R&D of a laser-welded external. It’s a wholesale departure from us using custom brackets and 3M VHB tape. That will provide a nicer finished product to our end user, and it’ll allow us to make our product faster with less material and less steps.

What qualities do you look for when adding someone to the team?

Creativity is extremely important. As a small manufacturing company, our priorities can shift on a day or in an afternoon where we don’t have the full line of product anymore. There are all sorts of examples in the past few years of times where you have to react pretty quickly. The motherboard’s been EOL’d, or we have to change our sheet metal design, build a new part, things like that. Making sure that someone can adapt to those changes on a moment’s notice is one of the key parts of the job.

We also want people who get excited about a new challenge and have the desire to keep improving something. I look for people who like to make things and go back in and refine it and not hold it up on this pillar. It’s good to not look at something like it’s perfect.

You have a lot of love for your Audi. What do you love about it over other options?

I like German cars. We have a family of them. They’re high-performance and not too expensive if you do all the work on it yourself. There’s a huge after-market community that tunes and changes these cars, which is pretty fun. Plus I prefer the metric system. Having a standard system drives me nuts, because what the [REDACTED] are fractions?

My real love, though, is bikes. I love tuning and riding bikes, and I love that more than I like to work on cars. It comes out of tinkering. I work with carbon fiber, I’ve done a lot of repairs on bikes over the years—there’s a certain sense of freedom you get from riding a bike that you can’t get from anything else. Not motorcycles, not cars.

[system76]

Behind the Scenes of System76: Sales Team

The System76 Behind the Scenes series aims to give readers an inside look at the people behind our mission. This week, we spoke with VP of Sales Sam Mondlick about the challenges of conducting business during a pandemic, and how long it’ll take the Sales Team to make a certain blog author a millionaire.

You know. The important things.

Take a moment to describe the different functions of the Sales Team.

The Sales Team itself is currently made up of two different positions. The Customer Experience Specialist (CES) is the first line of conversation with System76 with regards to anything order-related. Their job is to make your process from purchase to shipment as easy as possible and provide you with as much information as you might need, such as giving status updates about orders or answering questions that may have arisen.

The other position within Sales is Account Management. They’re the people you talk to from first inquiry to System76 about products. These guys help anyone, from my 80-year-old grandma who’s looking to transition from Windows to Linux, to Fortune 50 companies. They deal with a wide variety of customer base, so they’re pretty much experts in getting the customer what they need.

Then there’s the Product Management side of Sales. The Product Manager stays up to date on all-new technology, and then informs and directs the team. The position was built to ensure System76 is at the forefront of new and exciting technologies, whether that’s within the Thelio product line or in the form of updates that come to our laptops. And that could be as simple as tracking memory updates from DDR4 to DDR5, or with PCIe 3.0 updating to PCIe 4.0. For things like that we’ll track and update products throughout their lifetime.

What is the guiding principle for how the System76 Sales Team operates?

The Sales Team philosophy we push is what I call, “Consultative Sales.” We’re here to be an assistant to the user in order to get them the right product for the job; we’re not going to upgrade you for the sake of upgrading. The team is there to understand what you want to accomplish so that they can get you the right machine with the optimal performance for your use case.

What factors into the decision to introduce a new product?

There’s quite a few factors internally that we’ll go through. Looking at our product line we ask ourselves, is there something that’s missing from it? And if we do find something, what are the benefits to it? How is it going to make us as a company better, and us as a provider of Linux-based technologies the right fit for our customers?

For the Lemur Pro, battery life had always been a high-value item for our customer base. Before the Lemur Pro and Darter Pro were introduced about 2 years ago, the average battery life on a System76 computer was about 3-5 hours. The ability to introduce a product with a higher battery wattage allowed us to extend battery life almost threefold. That value is really what drives a product forward. 

What is your team’s background with Linux?

A lot of the team members have a background in Linux as users. That’s what we tend to typically hire and bring on. They are apt in review and understanding, and helping customers that have specific tasks and needs within the Linux environment. Charles was using Raspberry Pis in order to do some cool things, and Bradley used Ubuntu even before he was hired. The same can be said for Jeremy and John. They all believe that Linux is the right tool for people, and they showcase that for incoming customers. Even if they’re not tech-savvy within Linux, there’s a background there with using it and seeing it in the wild.

What challenges did the pandemic present when it first started?

I think at the very beginning, the biggest challenge for us was the loss of the team camaraderie. A lot of Sales is personal relationships, and the team feeds off of each other, so having everyone in the same area was a huge benefit pre-pandemic.

In the first month or so after it started, there were definitely challenges with productivity and communication because Sales works a lot with Engineering, Support, and other departments in order to give the customers the information they need to make an educated decision, or to update them on the status of their order.

But, I think one of the best tools we have is our employee messaging client. That was already ingrained in us as something that was used pre-pandemic that really started to show its value post-pandemic, especially with the team members being in different homes—and in some cases, different states. It allowed us to provide our staff with as much as they needed to make their environment feel like they were still in an office, still able to get the camaraderie, and still able to get almost the same instantaneous response as they would in the office, but now done remote.

Our ability to put tech first, especially within Sales and Service, is one of the things we do really well. We never throw people at a problem. By that I mean we don’t delegate a problem up the chain to solve it. Instead we work for a solution, and our people evolve into that solution. From my viewpoint, we’ve established that a remote environment is as productive as an in-person environment, which has opened up the door for System76 to grow. Instead of working within a local pool, we’ve now moved to the ocean. Whereas you used to have to hire and work to provide resources for new hires to move to Denver so they can work with the team, now we can bring on team members from pretty much anywhere on the globe to come help make System76 better. 

System76 has seen steady growth in the past year despite drastic political and economic changes. What do you attribute the success to?

I think we’ve matured as an organization. We have introduced products and product lines that are meeting and exceeding a lot of different customer requirements. When I look at our desktop line from when I started seven years ago, our options were the Ratel, the Wild Dog, the Leopard, and the Sable. With production moving in-house and the introduction of Thelio in the last two and a half years, keeping in mind both Intel and AMD, we’ve gone from offering a four-desktop solution to nine.

Laptop and desktop quality has also increased in the last seven years, and a lot of that has to do with what we’ve done in our new manufacturing facility. We have made leaps and bounds with regards to what we’re doing with software engineering now. There’s a huge demand for what our Software Engineering Team has done, driven by Jeremy and our open firmware/open EC that speak to a lot of people. Companies are looking at an open source solution instead of proprietary because they want more control over what their team and their organization are doing.

One of the things we’ve noticed is that our business clients have grown. There’s significantly more support and drive from both the end user and the corporate side to make it so Linux is a valued and desired solution for their teams. Today, I can probably put a Windows 10 machine next to my Pop!_OS 20.10 machine and accomplish everything in the same amount of time or faster. Maybe I’m not using the same applications, but anything I as a businessperson could do within Windows, I can now do with Pop!_OS or Ubuntu. The Linux ecosystem is continuously changing, and that only helps us as a company.

You’ve been at System76 for quite a while. What’s it been like watching the company grow?

It’s amazing. When I started at the company, I was really the first Sales-oriented person. I was the 8th employee at the time, and now I’m the 5th-oldest employee of System76 out of over 50 employees. So it’s huge, man.

When you look at a lot of big corporations, change is hard to make happen. It’s looked at as too different, too risky. But here, change is really something we strive for. We work to be different, to be new, to figure out new ways to help our customers or create solutions to help them, or figure out ways that can change us for the better that you just typically wouldn’t see from a corporation.

What was your favorite moment?

When I first looked at System76, back when we were only offering Ubuntu, I saw the beginning of something very similar to another major player. Very grassroots, very much specialized and hardware-specific. They also created their own operating system, so when I interviewed in 2014, I made comments during my interview with Carl that I expected us to probably produce our own operating system as well. I thought that would be our endgame as a company. At that time, and Carl might contradict my memory on this, but I remember he didn’t think that would ever happen. And then in October 2017, we released the first version of Pop!_OS. That made everything come kind of full-circle for me.

The following year, we brought hardware inside in order to make it the best that we could. So in three short years from me starting, we took what we were doing and elevating it to something that only a handful of companies do, and do well. Our potential is really limitless from what I’ve seen so far, and it’s very apparent with what we’ve done with Pop!_OS since its release, as well as where we’ve taken Thelio. I bet you we never thought we would’ve implemented something like i3 tiling into Pop!_OS. I really goes back to how we view change. We embrace it. We see it as trying to do something better than we did before. Carl and the Engineering Team view software as always being about revision, and we bring that philosophy back to hardware and back to the company as a whole.

[system76]

Things We Love About the New Thelio Mira

Today, we introduce you to the newest addition to our Thelio desktop line: Thelio Mira. Our in-house engineers have been hard at work creating this pro solution for you, so without further ado, let’s get into the things we love about our new desktop:

A Chimera of Size and Performance

One day, we wondered, “What if we expanded Thelio to support more memory and more powerful GPUs?” Our in-house science team quickly got to work, splicing the compact genes of Thelio and the performant genes of Thelio Major. Then they removed the extra limbs, and presto! Thelio Mira was born. This happy little test tube baby is configurable with 4th Gen AMD Ryzen CPUs, PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage, and up to 128GB of RAM.

A Tale of Two GPUs

Thelio Mira can house two of the largest, most powerful GPUs on the market, like the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000. Legend has it that when these two components are brought together, humanity will accelerate past its archaic technology towards an enlightened future. Double your multitasking capabilities, rendering resources, and CUDA cores to provide the might your project deserves. It also deserves a large cookie. We don’t sell those, though.

A Terraformed Interior Climate

Thelio Mira is thermally engineered to prevent throttling and allow your pro-grade components to perform to their maximum potential. To account for the accumulating heat generated by these components, we’ve taken advantage of the jet streams to draw cool air through the bottom of the chassis and expunge hot air out through a CPU duct. Meanwhile, liquid in copper pipes absorbs heat from the CPU and carries it into the heat sink as a gas, where it’s cooled back into a liquid. Our in-house meteorologists predict sunny days and strong winds, resulting in a perfect temperate day for your system.

A Gentle Whisper

What’s it saying? If you listen closely, you’ll hear your system pledge to keep things quiet while the fans are running. More importantly, you’ll hear yourself on video calls, as well as your cat’s many pleas for a gourmet salmon dinner. Maybe tomorrow, Coriander.

A Humble Origin

Thelio Mira is born from a single sheet of aluminum that’s then cut, bent, powder-coated, and dipped in a soothing acid, all at our manufacturing facility in Denver. The chassis is then etched with elegant design and topped off with a veneer of real wood, adding character to your office. Legally, we may or may not be required to say that this character absolutely 100% will not be Mickey Mouse.

Handcrafting computers in-house also means better support for YOU, noble citizen. Our team of real humans is here to ensure you enjoy the best product experience possible. Unlike those other guys, who rely on a team of real desk-birds-who-dip-faces-in-water to peck at the problem to no avail.

And that’s the list! Head to our website to learn more about all the things to love about Thelio Mira. Our team would love to hear about what you’ll be using it for!

[system76]

Behind the Scenes of Thelio Mega Engineering

In 2017, we announced that we were going to bring the design and manufacturing of our products in-house. The driving purpose was to leverage our understanding of our users’ needs in order to engineer better products for them. In 2018, we shipped the first fruits of our labor and, over the course of the last two years, shipped hundreds of updates to the Thelio line as we continuously integrated improvements into our manufacturing. Establishing our factory in Colorado made this possible, but we were just getting started.

Early this year, we set off to engineer our workstation version of a Le Mans Hypercar. It started with a challenge: Engineer a quad-GPU workstation that doesn’t thermal throttle any of the GPUs. Three GPUs is pretty easy. Stack the forth one in there and it’s a completely different animal. Months of work and thousands of engineering hours later we accomplished our goal. Every detail was scrutinized. Every part is of the highest quality. And new factory capabilities, like milling, enabled us to introduce unique solutions to design challenges. The result is Thelio Mega. A compact, high-performance quad-GPU system that’s quiet enough to sit on your desk.

We started with simple fan placement experiments to determine the best location for intake and exhaust fans and sizes. Computer fluid dynamics simulations assisted to dial in air flow ducts followed by hundreds of fan placement iterations and thermal tests.

*One of many CFD simulations.

We use gpuburn and stress-ng utilities to stress the components for each iteration until eventually finding the optimum fan position, size, speed, and duct design. Moving the side fans as little as 5mm up, down, left or right changes the thermal properties. Airflow shape has a considerable impact as well. The side intake panel has a duct on the back that directs air from the side and bottom fans into different areas of the GPUs. This helps limit inefficient turbulence and improves performance.

Inside the CPU duct, three fans of different, carefully chosen speeds pull and push air through the heat exchanger and exhaust it through the rear. The CPU duct fan positions were even more sensitive. 2mm of change in different directions improved or degraded performance.

Finally, we moved Thelio Mega into our acoustic testing booth to perfect the fan curves and make design tweaks for the quietest possible operation.

New in Thelio Mega are stabilizing feet and a PCI brace system, both milled from aluminum bar stock. The new PCI brace is particularly impressive. Nubs hold the GPUs steady for easier installation and a sliding brace locks them securely in place.

Our Thelio line is known for its natural and stained wood veneer, but we're particularly fond of the vent design flourishes that grace the system. If you have to make holes, you might as well make them interesting. The upper CPU vent is three celestial bodies representing the three-body problem in physics (and a fantastic novel by Liu Cixin). The GPU intake vent is embellished by rockets escaping the atmosphere. The rear CPU exhaust is the planetary alignment of the Solar System at the time of the Unix epoch.

Months of engineering was resulting in excellent performance and acoustic results. Often, quad GPU systems are terribly loud, unpleasant to work on, and throttle when under heavy GPU workloads. While working on Thelio Mega in quiet environments, it became clear that this was a new class of high-performance GPU compute workstation. But we wanted to be sure that we’re creating substantial value for the engineers and scientists that will get the most out of this system.

A common chassis used for quad-GPU setups is the Corsair Carbide Series™ Air 540 High Airflow ATX Cube Case. So we bought one. We ran thermal and acoustic tests on Thelio Mega, moved the components to the Corsair case and used the high-end Corsair H100i Pro 240mm liquid cooler in lieu of the custom Thelio Mega CPU cooling system.

Components Used Motherboard TRX40 AORUS XTREME AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64 GB 3200 MHz Kingston Memory 250 GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe drive 4 x NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080ti (Gigabyte GV-N208TTURBO-11GC)

During our thermal engineering work, we found that 8 minutes is optimal for stressing the GPUs and iterating the design. If you get to 8 minutes without throttling, the system tends to be able to go much longer. We later expanded the tests to 16 hours. We used 10 minutes for CPU comparison. It wasn’t necessary to go longer. The Corsair case was unable to reach either 8 or 10 minutes without throttling.

GPU Cooling Test Results

Higher GPU fan percentage means higher load and louder operation. The NVIDIA RTX 2080Ti starts to throttle between 87 and 88 degrees C. Below 250 watts represents thermal throttling. The room temperature was 72 degrees Fahrenheit.

Thelio Mega GPU Burn - 8 Minutes

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GPU GPU Fan Usage GPU Temperature Watts 0 93% 83C 250 1 93% 83C 250 2 85% 78C 250 3 99% 86C 250

Corsair Case GPU Burn - 8 Minutes

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GPU GPU Fan Usage GPU Temperature Watts 0 100% 88C 220-230 1 100% 88C 210-230 2 87% 85C 250 3 100% 88C 170-180

CPU Cooling Test Results

Thelio Mega stress-ng -c 128 (stressing 128 threads for 10 minutes) CPU Temperature - 85C

Corsair Case w/ Corsair H100i Pro Liquid Cooler stress-ng -c 128 (stressing 128 threads for 10 minutes) CPU Temperature - throttling at 94.2C

So we’re doing great on GPU and CPU cooling. How about acoustics?

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Thelio Mega at Idle 31.8dB Corsair at Idle 45.7dB Thelio Mega CPU Stress 46.2dB Corsair CPU Stress 48.0dB Thelio Mega GPU Stress 53.5dB Corsair GPU Stress 62.3dB

For reference, 30-40 dB is a whisper to a quiet library. 50 is moderate rainfall. 60 is normal conversation and dishwashers. 70 is traffic and vacuums. Thelio Mega doesn’t get much louder than rainfall.

An additional benefit of developing an extreme-performance product, like Thelio Mega, is that the engineering that goes into this product can spread to other models in the Thelio line. Already, the engineering from Thelio Mega is being ported to Thelio Massive. And features from this work will move into Thelio Major as well. Engineering this kind of product pushes the envelope, and in doing so, improves the entire product line.

It’s our mission to use our expertise in hardware engineering, design, and manufacturing to enable engineers and scientists to explore and discover. We’re excited to bring our months of work to you and see the incredible work that Thelio Mega can help you achieve.