That's the problem: price and availability. It only challenges Xeon in raw numbers, but $/performance matters a lot especially at scale. If I were building a da

That's the problem: price and availability. It only challenges Xeon in raw numbers, but $/performance matters a lot especially at scale. If I were building a data center I'd choose more slightly slower CPUs if the total power per $ were higher. Energy use maters a lot too. The only niche I can see for a platform that offers maximum performance per-machine at a huge price premium is hard-to-parallelize and legacy applications that need reliable maximum performance in a single box. That's not really that big of a niche these days. If IBM wants to launch this they're going to have to take a loss to prime the pump: sell the chip at cost or even slightly below cost to get it out there into the market and get people using it. Otherwise it's going nowhere.