Server cost is dominated by storage at the moment. DRAM is also a large static cost with little negotiation room. The cost of a P9 and motherboard is a small subset of a system build and below the price of Skylake for me.

which is why they're not being sold directly to enterprises but to Cloud Providers. I'm not a hardware engineer so not familiar with the fine print but what I've read so far seems to suggest that Power systems are more efficient at running Database-centric workloads and the power hypervisor is an order of magnitude more efficient than intel ones http://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Intel-x86-and-IBM-POWE....

Disclosure: I work on IBM cloud, but only tangentially with the Power systems.

Is there a cloud provider that allows a EU-based natural-person customer buy a little Power 9 time for testing?

Last I looked, Power cloud offerings required the customer to be a big company that buys a lot of compute.

I think IBM Softlayer has been renting out small numbers of Power-based machines for a while now, enough to test with.

Correct! They rent out POWER8 systems: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/bare-metal-servers/power. POWER9 systems don't seem to be available (yet).

As for the future, I can't say much publicly (le sigh) but let me just say that personally I think future of power is bright, especially with cloud providers.

The article addresses this at a couple of points, do you know factors which would counter its argument, or are you just pointing to the same history the article pointed to?

e.g.: "Power 9 should do better than its predecessors given its costs, bandwidth, and ease of porting. Power 9 is IBM’s first to use standard DIMMs, opening a door to other standard components that are, overall, cutting system costs by 20% to 50% compared to the Power 8, said IBM’s partners."

IBM will never understand this but few, if any, architectures have made it into the datacenter that were not first affordable for experimenters and enthusiasts.

The burden of proof is on those claiming the pricing does not present a barrier to entry to the ecosystem.

I am curious about developing for Power. Please link me to an entry-level system I can buy on the web.

Well there are some counter examples, network switches, fiber channel, and Infiniband come to mind. And of course IBM "invented" the data center by defining environmental requirements for their machines in the 50's and 60's.

Setting that aside though, its true that easy experimental access can allow a technology to "sneak in" to a market that previously ignored it, but that isn't really the case here. (nor was it the case for SPARC or Itanium) These systems are being built for folks who are going to deploy a lot of them and they already know their cost of ownership numbers for existing x64 boxes.

This is an excellent way to cater to the legacy app market, but not a very good way to ride the next wave.

The next wave is probably running on commodity x86 hardware running Linux and using gamer-grade GPUs. They'll probably be first deployed to production on x86 virtual hardware in a cloud provider.

If you want companies to adopt your technology, make their developers adopt it first. That's how most of the current enterprise DevOps tools happened.

No one has accused of IBM of 'riding the next wave', sometimes I wonder if they even start paddling as the wave swells :-).

At least at Google the driving factor is total cost of ownership, full stop. When you need as much compute as they do to deliver on what they deliver, saving a few percent on the TCO flows right to the bottom line.

That said I don't see them going full on with this technology if its QP$S[1] isn't competitive with x64.

[1] Queries per dollar-second.

Buying the perfect hardware for your workload works really well when you have a couple million boxes to run it. POWER9 has the insanely fast NVLink to connect to specialized silicon Google has enough volume to design and build.

Where it can make a substantial dent in the x86 server is precisely this HPC niche. A 10% faster $300 box is worth $30 more, hardly enough to warrant extra work, but a 10% faster $10 million dollar machine is worth a million more.

The article addresses this too, favorably. So I take it you're gainsaying the article but it's not quite clear just why.

^^^ this should be the top comment.

Sun/SPARC for example, benefited greatly in Dot-Com v1.0 because so many universities had great prices via edu discounts. The sysadmins and other Unix users all cut their teeth on Sun boxes; so when they got jobs they took along their familiarity with Sun, which resulted in a lot of sales.

And as a developer you could get a basic v100 (or was it v120?) 1U 'server' from Sun really cheaply. Sure it was a single CPU with a PATA disk and no hotswap or redundant components, but it was a cheap SPARC you could test your stuff on.

Why does it matter what enthusiasts use? There are piles of Enterprise software written in Java that can be shifted to any architecture you care to name on a moment's notice. Lots of Java shops would bite your hand off if offered a 20% price cut for instances in exchange for switching architectures.

> Why does it matter what enthusiasts use?

A. Many of the people who today specify datacenter hardware came into that career as enthusiasts (aka "early adopters") and are more comfortable recommending what they have experience with.

B. Enthusiasts bring the consumer volume that drives down production cost. This is a necessary driver of Moore's law.

I'm pretty sure that the major Datacenter operators run quantitative analyses on all possible candidate chips. There aren't that many.

JVM is heavily optimized for x64.

IBM has their own jvm for power9 across all their OS families.

If the hardware is good enough, someone will write a JVM for it that's competitive. As the other respondent notes, IBM can do it themselves.

SPARC?

Entry level workstations were readily available and all over universities.

It's worth noting that even entry-level machines were quite expensive compared to midrange PCs and were more or less in the same price range as high-end machines.

If, however, IBM can get me a 32GB single-core/8-thread POWER9 machine for the same price Lenovo can give me a performance-equivalent 4-core/4-tread Xeon, I'll be tempted. Worst case scenario, I'll still run my x86 workloads on my trusty Lenovo and use the POWER9 as a nice X terminal.

I can say for sure they are not more expensive than comparable xeons. Even cheaper by some measures.