A repost of a question I posted a little over two years ago. I'm wondering who actually buys IBM POWER9 systems - and does IBM actually net money off POWER9?
I once interned on IBM's PowerPC JVM team 10 years ago. Most of our customers were enterprise customers running monolith applications e.g. governments and banks. IIRC the main advantage of PowerPC was a much wider bus resulting in higher memory bandwidth than x86. I'm not sure if that's still the case today but I doubt anyone in those orgs want to take the risk of switching to an entirely different architecture and risk losing millions of dollars if something goes wrong.
If I had slightly more money I would buy one of the raptor systems just out of interest to try it out as a daily use machine.
IBM sells just the CPUs, is that right? So they are targeting mainframe or other enterprise applications. Whereas Raptor CS that you linked to is selling a desktop version. Other than hobby interest, could the desktop use case be for developers that are building applications for mainframes that use that CPU?
I have a POWER9 system actually - it has a number of shortcomings that make it not so practical as a daily driver. For one, it doesn't go to sleep and draws 27Watt at a minimum. It also has no integrated graphics which means I need an AMD or NVIDIA graphics card which have spotty support at best on POWER...
Not to mentioned it takes anywhere between 90s and 5 minutes to boot. It spends over one minute doing init including things like training DDR4 and PCI-e serdes links.
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IBM sells just the CPUs, is that right? So they are targeting mainframe or other enterprise applications. Whereas Raptor CS that you linked to is selling a desktop version. Other than hobby interest, could the desktop use case be for developers that are building applications for mainframes that use that CPU?
Not to mentioned it takes anywhere between 90s and 5 minutes to boot. It spends over one minute doing init including things like training DDR4 and PCI-e serdes links.
IBM charges 11k for their 8 core POWER9 CPU alone...