While I trust POWER9 to be very fast, I have had odd performance differences (both positive - meaning I overspent in hardware and had some explaining to do - and negative - meaning I was too optimistic and had some explaining to do) when moving from x86 to SPARC, Itanium and POWER (and MIPS - I'm that old).
The Talon are good entry level POWER9 systems for reasonable prices, but I'd love to see parts trickling down to Xeon E5 prices.
If the barrier of entry is too high, only what already runs on POWER8 will move to POWER9. Xeons have good cost/performance and are a safer bet.
Nobody does, they are still in the pre-order stage.
This means you'll have at least KVM so you can run nearly anything on top of that including Windows VMs with PCI-passthrough for gaming,etc.
The cost is non-trivial but I've been working up my nerve to pull the trigger and go this route.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-systems/talos-s...
Now I search eBay for one. I have a couple Suns ;-)
> Do you have one? Do you use it as a daily workstation?
I wish. Can't justify the price tag for a novelty item.
"two Power9 chips, four Volta GPUs accelerators, and 256 GB of memory" =~$65,000
The NVidia DX1 (8 Tesla GPUs, 2 Xeon, so much more GPU, less CPU) is $125,000[1]
Configuring up a SuperMicro GPU server looks to be around $50,000[2]
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2016/04/05/nvidia-dgx-1-deep-learni...
[2] https://www.thinkmate.com/system/superserver-1029gq-txrt