[walki]

When POWER8 came out in 2014 I ran a couple of numerical benchmarks against Intel Xeon CPUs. In my benchmarks the POWER8 CPUs where slightly faster than Intel Xeon CPUs when the data fitted into the CPU's cache, so far so good (the speed advantage of the POWER8 CPU can easily be explained by the much higher clocking). But once I started running heavy benchmarks involving gigabytes of data the POWER8 CPUs where at least twice as slow. Now 3 years later POWER9 CPUs will come out that are about 1.5 times faster, in my opinion this is not enough to compete against Intel. Why would anybody want to get locked into a rare and more expensive CPU architecture if there is no speed advantage?

[kev009]

The idea of the OpenPower thing is that you are no more locked in than you are on x86, perhaps not quite as open as arm64 but it's pretty nice in theory.

Also, I have a major sad for our industry when people struggle so much with alternative architectures. Tons of software absolutely should not care including JVM languages, scripting languages, Golang. Most userland compiled languages should also minimally care. For lower level C stuff, regular compilation on non-x86 archs is often directly reflected on overall code quality (new compiler warnings, things like alignment correctness, cache/memory coherency model assumptions, data type assumptions, etc). It is somewhat hard to port operating systems and "efficiency libraries" that invoke platform features, but it also takes a comparatively small number of people to do.

[low_battery]

Most of the applications are heavily optimized for x86 processors for years. There are so many applications littered with intrinsics and x86 assembler coded blocks, algorithms are tuned for x86 and intel specific memory characteristics. Arm got some attention because of phones, but only in last few years.

Power8/9 are very decent processors with a lot of raw power, but it will take a more concentrated and long term effort to have a level playing field in the software landscape.

[daxorid]

Some of us believe that the open platform is worth the expense.

ME, and the absolute refusal of Intel to allow its own customers to disable it, is very scary to the tinfoil hat crowd.

Unfortunately, Raptor Engineering is still early in development of their POWER8 board, and even that may ultimately turn out to be vaporware.

[spitfire]

If they haven't released by now, they probably won't. Sad but true, technology has a shelf life.

If they wait another 6 months it simply won't be economical to release it ever.

[rwmj]

You might have issues with the quality of your compiler or you might be using POWER7 code and/or have VSX disabled. IME POWER8 is somewhat faster than high end Xeons (although not in terms of price/performance).

[walki]

I compiled my code using the latest GCC version available, I even made sure I used the right compiler flags to enable e.g. hardware POPCNT support. I know that IBM claimed that POWER8 CPUs were faster than Intel Xeon CPUs but I found the opposite to be true (at least for the benchmarks I cared about). You can also find many other benchmarks on the web which are in favor of Intel Xeon CPUs compared to POWER8.

I am not against IBM POWER CPUs, I was just disappointed by POWER8...

[rwmj]

Fair enough. I'm sure it's workload dependent, and also I have not tested huge data sets. I'm most interested in the overhead of virtualization and (separately) compile times.

[rleigh]

Why would you be "locked in"?

I've developed for and used Linux and BSD on several platforms. Moving to a different one is trivial unless you're dependent upon proprietary binaries which can't be rebuilt. If you're using open code, or code which you have the ability to rebuild for the new platform, you're not locked in.

[theandrewbailey]

Uptime. Reliability. Support. Feature set. Backwards compatibility.