[lykr0n]

I wish IBM had a massively lower barrier to entry.

They have a lot of amazing products and tech, but the only way you can use it is to buy a license. When I want to make a simple application, I'm not going to even consider paying for unknown software. But if I can get a version that gives me very good insight into how it works, and a license that would allow me to use the product for a good amount before paying- I'd be much more inclined to adopt it.

POWER CPUs are great, but they're quite hard to get for a developer like myself. I'm sure you could make some cool software on POWER9 or one of these, but they're impossible to get your hands on to play around with.

[mhh__]

POWER9 is expensive, POWER10 is unobtainium as far as I can tell and will be for a while.

[jpgvm]

POWER10 is unlikely to be available in until Q3 or so 2022 I would imagine. With things as they are unobtanium is going to be status quo for some time. :(

[yencabulator]

For what it's worth, in ~2002 we were developing a product that IBM wanted ported to run as a Linux VM on their hardware, and they just plain out loaned us a smallish mainframe for a year or two. It only fit in the elevator after removing it from the wood crate.

[rwmj]

You can get Power 9 systems on IBM's cloud. There's some pricing on this page. I don't know enough about clouds to know how it compares to AWS: https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog/services/power-systems-virtual...