For what it's worth, I'm in the trading world and we evaluated Power8. It's cool. But reality is, it needs to become ubiquitous before it's all that useful. Yo

For what it's worth, I'm in the trading world and we evaluated Power8. It's cool. But reality is, it needs to become ubiquitous before it's all that useful. You're looking at $6k+ for a 2 socket barebones system... preposterous. If you want FLOPS, you can add a few Titan X's to a dual socket E5 server and absolutely destroy the Power9. Want ECC? Throw in a single Tesla. Don't want to rewrite code for CUDA? Use an Intel Xeon Phi with the Intel C/C++ compiler. Just need more CPU power? Throw in top of the line Xeon E7's and they'll still outperform. Now, the math on this would change if Power8 actually managed to become ubiquitous and competitive price-wise.