this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
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What about POWER9? You can buy a complete workstation right now, with an open source CPU, Board, BIOS. It'll cost you an arm, a leg, and probably some more internal organs, but it is currently more functional than RISC-V.
Never heard of it, wanna pitch its benefits?
I mean, you probably heard of PowerPC. IBM kept working on that, is still working on it. They're at Power10 now, but that has some proprietary blobs, as opposed to POWER9.
I'd say that it's mainly cool because it's an architecture with enough performance for modern stuff, that is completely open source. No proprietary BIOS, no Management Engine running unknown code. Also, pretty stable, supposedly.
Only supported by Linux, some BSDs, and some proprietary IBM *nixes, if you wanna say you have a system that literally can't run Windows.
If you want fun facts, the currently 9th most powerful supercomputer, Summit, runs on it, I guess.
The hardware is too expensive for pretty much anyone to actually wanna use it, but oh well, what do you do.
You can get yourself a workstation for about $10k here. https://www.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/intro.html