Sadly, it's only for extraordinary programmers.

I don't know, I mean, programmers spend so much money and little value hardware just for brand value and such, so the money is there. But those that spend that amount of money on computers are seldom in the group of those who have an interested in a POWER machine.

Raptor PCs are already taking pre-orders. https://raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html They start at $4,700 for a complete system (the desktop) or $2,400 if you just want the motherboard and one CPU.

I couldn't find the exact CPU model it can use.

Are there different socket types for Power9 CPUs?

I have no idea. There is no ark.ibm.com :-(

IBM only has 3 processors announced so far and they look pretty similar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER9#Variants Also the CPU page https://raptorcs.com/content/CP9M01/intro.html says "additional Sforza CPU options are planned" so... they're probably Sforza.

It seems they're all in the Sforza family. I'd like to see their bigger brothers, though this workstation seems quite impressive by itself.

The Zaius/Barreleye systems use the LaGrange chips instead; the quick breakdown I made for wikipedia was:

    Sforza —   50 mm × 50 mm,     4 DDR4, 48 PCIe Lanes, 1 XBus 4B
    Monza —    68.5 mm × 68.5 mm, 8 DDR4, 34 PCIe Lanes, 1 XBus 4B
    LaGrange — 68.5 mm × 68.5 mm, 8 DDR4, 42 PCIe Lanes, 2 XBus 4B

Though I have no idea what XBus is.

Why buy? As long as you don't care what specific CPUs you're running, it's usually way cheaper to rent.

Personal example: Over the course of earning my master's, I was able to use the equivalent of a $FIVE_DIGIT_PRICE computing cluster as often as I cared to, for an ultimate total of $THREE_DIGIT_PRICE.

Yes that works very well for x86 (of the intel variety) and for GPUS of the Nvidia variety. For other options there isnt much available. Also if you are developing client side software you notice that most popular CPU sku's for consumers dont show up in any cloud, so it is hard to reason about performance without having access to them. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, would be great if someone built a service where one could rent a box with any cpu ever sold in the last 10 years (same with GPUS).

Is there any reason I should care exactly which chips I'm working with, though?

If I were buying the hardware, sure. But if I'm renting then it's all just a means to an end.

If you are working on low level code and want to understand how your code behaves on client hardware. Low end chips are the most tricky since their performance profile is markedly different.

Raptor CS is putting the power9 in within the range of an above average programmer (earning above average wages). You can get a decent config for about USD 16000.

Renting one probably makes more sense for an ordinary programmer. If the chip is $5000, that's a lot of workload on a cloud server.

Hopefully we will see this on a public cloud somewhere. I think there is a great business opportunity for someone to start a commercial hardware lab for developers which gives remote access to new / upcoming hardware. Would gladly pay 50-100 (possibly more depending on whats offered) bucks a month if I could get access to new GPUs / CPUs / networking gear / FPGAS etc. Would allow me to significantly downsize my homelab.

There used to be remote access offered by IBM and Uni of Oregon for open source developers to do porting work.

The NVIDIA DGX station has one ;)

The NVIDIA DGX is available for purchase in select countries and is priced at:

DGX with P100 at $129,000*

DGX with V100 at $149,000

You can always sell your house and buy a couple of those :-)

I am sure there are parts of the world where you could sell one of these and buy multiple houses :)

That’s the pricing for DGX-1 server the workstation costs only $69,000....

;)