[E39M5S62]

It's simply too expensive. People that want to play around with a non-x86_64 system can buy one of a thousand different ARM devices and get all sorts of software running on it. If you want POWER, you're buying old datacenter gear with all the downsides of that class of hardware - or you're buying a Raptor system where the price has skyrocketed in recent years for aging hardware.

I pre-ordered a Blackbird motherboard and 32 thread CPU and got it in 2019. I used it as my main workstation until 2022 and then decided I'd had enough fighting the software ecosystem. I still have the machine because I've regretted selling other odd hardware in the past ... especially my dual 133mhz BeBox.

[johnklos]

This. There are no inexpensive Power SBCs like we have for ARM and RISC-V. Heck, even MIPS has ways to buy and run inexpensively (I run NetBSD on Ubiquiti Edgerouter hardware, for instance).

If we could have a low end, quad core 2 GHz Power SBC with 4 gigs for $80 and a microATX motherboard with 16 cores at, say, around 4.5 GHz for under $500, the ecosystem would be VASTLY different.

Right now, all of my PowerPC work is on an old 1.5 GHz PowerPC G4 Mac mini and on an even older first generation iMac upgraded with a 600 MHz PowerPC G3. It'd be nice to have new hardware that didn't cost more than a decked out Ryzen 7950X3D system.

[KerrAvon]

I would completely seriously buy that hypothetical POWER SBC immediately.

[snvzz]

>and then decided I'd had enough fighting the software ecosystem.

And by all indications, such ecosystem is now never going to take off.

In contrast, RISC-V is rapidly growing the strongest ecosystem.

[alfalfasprout]

This. And that extends to the datacenter too.

So, why spend all the time improving compiler outputs for a platform that doesn't have that much traction or perceived potential?

[frabre]

I also have a Blackbird, and haven't had any issues with getting precompiled software or compiling software for it. What issues have you had?

I find it more performant than the kind of ARM hardware I think you're referring to, and more satisfying to use. I'd probably buy it again if mine died.

[E39M5S62]

A few major items were pain points for me:

* Firefox didn't have a Javascript JIT. That made using Grafana, GCP Console, etc, basically impossible in my browser of choice.

* Closed source Electron applications (Teams, Slack, etc) weren't able to run natively, and the browser solution worked poorly for me.

* I was using Void Linux PPC, a one-man fork of Void Linux. I decided that the bus factor was too high, and since I wasn't willing to switch distributions, I had to switch back to x86_64. This proved to be a good decision, because shortly after I switched, the maintainer of Void Linux PPC announced that he was stopping maintenance to work on Chimera Linux.

There were other little things that accumulated to create enough mental pressure to abandon it as a daily driver. It's fantastically neat hardware, and in my experience utterly reliable. I can't think of a single machine crash I had in the entire three years I used it daily. It can and does work well for plenty of people - it just wasn't quite right for me.