[TheAmazingRace]

What's funny about all this is, back when the Raptor Blackbird MicroATX board dropped in 2018, you could cobble together one of those with a quad core POWER9 CPU for a reasonable $1200 out the door. Prices went up exponentially after the pandemic due to sourcing issues and some channels used for parts drying up. A shame, really.

I used to own one of these systems before I sold it to my dad, and I'm eagerly awaiting a next generation offering, if it ever comes out.

[Fade_Dance]

What are the use cases for the second hand market such that prices can rise exponentially? Just hacking and perhaps at home testing for open source projects that need to run on the widest array of ISAs? Or is it just a scarcity thing?

[TheAmazingRace]

It's primarily scarcity. Unless you're in the know and are a special kind of computer geek (see Cameron Kaiser of Floodgap Gopher fame) - most folks aren't really going to know about Raptor's offerings. Very few folks are buying them new, thus very few make it on to the second-hand market.

I really want IBM's Power ISA to have more mindshare, as I think it's a cleaner design and more straightforward than the likes of ARM or RISC-V. Unfortunately, IBM is more concerned with wringing out every last dollar from their contracts instead of pushing the ISA out as much as they can. OpenPOWER was supposed to be this initiative, but it has seemingly fizzled out to a large extent, such that NVidia and Google no longer are Platinum members and hardly anyone talks about it anymore.