
IBM’s 2018 Rollout Plan for Power9 Systems - rbanffy
https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/02/06/ibms-2018-rollout-plan-power9-systems/
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peatmoss
I'd love to see at least one affordable developer-focused workstation
available from someone. Power9 will be cool.

EDIT: And by cool, I mean have interesting performance characteristics, not be
Intel arch, and seems to be one of the more plausibly not-backdoored CPUs in
this performance class.

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dragontamer
> affordable developer-focused workstation

[https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/](https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/)

Pre-order prices seem to be $4.2k+ USD. That's pretty "affordable" for Power.

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jandrese
Looks like $5k is the minimum for a system that could actually boot (has HDD
and memory). Affordable by enterprise computing standards, but you could buy a
really kicking Intel based desktop for that money. I'm guessing a 90W 4 Core
Power9 is not going to knock it out of the park compared to an i7-8700k.

It is hard to justify spending a lot more for a slower machine that most
software won't run on without a recompile. You have to place a whole lot of
value on the secure boot features.

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dragontamer
From a performance perspective... the minimum-spec'd version doesn't make much
sense at all. Especially since the 18-core Power is only $1290:
[https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/CP9M06/purchase.html](https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/CP9M06/purchase.html)

It is a dual-socket motherboard though. So fully-decked out with 2x 18cores
gets you to $9k or so.

But really, the point of a developer machine is to be an accessory to a Power9
server. You develop on the "cheap" $5k developer machine, and then run things
on the production $10k+ machine. So you basically want to build a test
environment that would emulate your bigger machine: dual socket (match the
NUMA with the bigger box), even if the CPUs are a lot smaller.

