IBM has been doing this for years.... at this point, research has to be a huge part of their expenses and royalties a huge part of their revenue. They invented things like copper interconnects that are standard now, along with a huge raft of other fundamental computing technologies still in use.

If IBM ever loses its technical edge and research staff, it's going to go under.

I had been reading about speeding up game programs by taking advantage of cache lines. Also, I've been reading "IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems" and came upon the initial development of cache. You'd think that the initial cache would fetch and store a word, but it didn't. It grabbed a block of words. In other words, a cache line. In 1968.

With the exception of talos and various bits of used hardware POWER has only been available in rather expensive systems-- so no onramp.

Even with things this announced it remains the case that EPYC, not power9, is the king of memory bandwidth per dollar at least at most price-points.

> at most price-points

Worth noting POWER9 reaches price points (and profit margins) EPYC server vendors can only dream of.

Sadly, you are right about onboarding. I'd love to have a POWER9 box as my desktop workstation, but I simply can't justify the price compared to a beefy Xeon (or EPYC) box. IBM would be wise to have a POWER9 that could compete with low-end Xeon servers.

Indeed, there is a realm of astronomical hardware that is covered by power9 that you're not finding amd hardware for, but going down to "merely the price of a new car" and below is where the comparison falls apart.

And the astronomical end really only matters if you need special requirements like single system images... if you just need lots of cycles or memory bandwidth, a cluster of lower end hosts (and 40GBE nics) is a lot less pricey.

> a POWER9 that could compete with low-end Xeon servers.

The Talos II is in the vague order of magnitude for that... which is A LOT better than before it existed.

True, but it's still, sadly, above my impulse-buy limit.

To make things a bit harder, I live in Europe and there aren't as many sources of used POWER8+ gear as there are in North America.

That's in recent years, of course. Previously, POWER was the architecture for Apple computers, as well as the Sony PlayStation 3.

I had a PS3 for building for power/cell... until sony bricked the darn thing! :)

After that for a while my PPC test box was a dual g4 xserve but it stopped booting inexplicably.

I have talos now and am pretty happy with it, but even that still struggles to compete with epyc in terms of price/performance (though at least a comparison can be made there).

I have some memories of the Cell processor, none of them fond. That beast was the hardest thing to program I ever saw. It made the first generation Xeon Phi's look like a dream.

I think it just depended on what you were doing on it, I 'ported' the CELT (Opus predecessor) to it in like.. an afternoon.

If you really want what POWER has to offer, like the ability to explore low level board firmware, the price is extremely competitive.