You can buy riscv in a year or 2 (for desktop), or wait 5 years for it to become performance competitive. Or you can buy power9 today (or end of 2019 for a cheaper model) and get a system that already exists, has silicon in production, and already appears to be performance competitive with Intel.

Mind, I'm probably waiting for whichever gets <$500 first because I'm not necessarily in a place where I can justify the money even for an open platform, but let's not pretend that there are massive benefits to both.

> Mind, I'm probably waiting for whichever gets <$500 first

This is pretty much my threshold as well, but when I actually think about these numbers and put them in perspective with regards to how much I used to spend on 486/pentium desktop computers when they were modern, and adjust those numbers for inflation, it's downright absurd that I'm not willing to spend what raptorcs is asking for a modern, open platform, in 2018 dollars.