A lot of "big compute" stuff from before the rise of the cloud was on mainframe-y type hardware. And still is, because migration is really really hard. Where

A lot of "big compute" stuff from before the rise of the cloud was on mainframe-y type hardware. And still is, because migration is really really hard. Where I work, we're still trying to migrate a bunch of services off of VMS+Itanium. My experience thus far is that putting this stuff in the cloud on commodity x86 is not really any cheaper or more performant. But it should end up being way easier to support and extend in the long run, so is probably still worth doing. The main problem that I run into is actually a people problem. There is no defined roadmap for doing this stuff, so it kind of feels like greenfield development, and you end up with endless bikeshedding and cargo-cult-driven design patterns. The happy path is easy, but it all falls apart on the edge cases. But handling the edge cases is why the customer pays you money... Anyway, I'm sure that IBM will continue to make and sell Power CPUs for a long time if only because it will take forever to migrate off of them.