I have a serious bee in my bonnet about POWER9. The architecture was something I was very excited about for low latency workloads; it seemed that only thing st

I have a serious bee in my bonnet about POWER9. The architecture was something I was very excited about for low latency workloads; it seemed that only thing stopping IBM from overtaking x86 in this space was the actual availability of hardware. POWER9 has been "in the works" for, what, two years now [1]? Google have been running POWER9 internally for at least 12 months [2], and IBM seem to have been caught up in the AI hype train by pivoting the POWER9 to some kind of "AI processing system" [3]. Had the P9 been released before Skylake, it might have been successful. By the time it is GA, it will be competing with x86 chips two generations higher than were available at the original P9 announcements and SPECInt benchmarks. This has been made even more frustrating by the fact that Oracle effectively killed off SPARC during this time. Perhaps Fujitsu will continue to run with it, but I think it's fair to say that development will stagnate and support will dwindle as it is increasingly obscure and niche architecture. [1] https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/08/24/big-blue-aims-sky-power9/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/08/24/big-blue-aims-sky-po... [2] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-Zaius-Google-and-Rackspaces-open-server-running-IBM-POWER9.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-Zai... [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2017/12/08/why-ibm-launched-instead-of-power9/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2017/12/08/why-i...