I think POWER9 is not radically different from a Skylake Xeon, from a performance perspective. AFAICS, the selling point of this thing is that it has a higher

I think POWER9 is not radically different from a Skylake Xeon, from a performance perspective. AFAICS, the selling point of this thing is that it has a higher BW and cache coherent connection between the GPU's and CPU's. Of course, some users like national labs, Google etc., might want to invest in this as a strategic investment, to keep Intel from becoming even more of a monopoly than they already are.