[matt_wulfeck]

> Power 9 is IBM’s first to use standard DIMMs, opening a door to other standard components that are, overall, cutting system costs by 20% to 50%

Glad to see them throwing in the towel on a pricey and proprietary component. Competition is good.

[kev009]

Note that the other DIMMs aren't completely arbitrary, they are buffered and require Centaur controllers to allow for much greater capacity and bandwidth (at increased latency). But for scale out workloads the on chip DDR controllers are great for both lower cost and lower latency.

[hinkley]

Didn’t IBM make exactly this same mistake thirty five years ago with PCs??

[wmf]

Which mistake exactly? Note that the Power9 processor itself is single-sourced from IBM so they don't have to worry about clones.