Some architectures are useful even if one can already tell they are probably not the future. For FreeBSD, sparc64 was important, because you could get multipro

Some architectures are useful even if one can already tell they are probably not the future. For FreeBSD, sparc64 was important, because you could get multiprocessor sparc64 machines easier (cheaper) than x86 with the same CPU count, even if they were slower; this made it possible to do work on scalability sooner. Now the same is happening with POWER9/10.