IBM's POWER9 retrospective is a little one-sided

I'm not going to fault IBM taking a victory lap with the POWER9 in their one-year anniversary retrospective. It's a kick-ass processor; that's why I'm typing this on one. I'm not even going to fault them for biasing it towards their own server products, because that's what IBM sells and they're a business and they want to sell their own stuff. And IBM maintaining financial health gives them the R&D capacity to make the POWER10 even more awesome, so bring on the salesdroids.

But while Google got a shout-out with their bespoke POWER9 Zaius server platform, now in production, IBM seems to have forgotten that Power ISA is making a triumphant return to the desktop in a form that's gotten at least as much press as Zaius/Barreleye, probably sold more units, and is actually in the hands of real end users who are using it as their real computers right now. Hmm, I wonder what computer that could be?

Let's consider the historical perspective: the last major Power desktop system that didn't come from IBM was of course the Power Mac G5 Quad, which was replaced by the Mac Pro in 2006. (The last Power workstations from IBM were the IntelliStation POWER 185 and 285. This pair of machines outlasted the Quad G5 until 2009 but they preferentially ran AIX, and weren't available in large numbers.) While PowerPC chips owned the game console market for a period of time (Wii/Wii U, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360), Apple's Intel transition meant the only remaining third-party PowerPC desktops were the AmigaOne machines. I like Amigas fine, but these systems so far have been rather underpowered due to their use of embedded designs and fairly expensive due to the small market, boutique production runs and distinctly poor economies of scale. Frankly, depending on how big a detractor you are, PowerPC hadn't been competitive against x86 on the desktop since the early G4 days, and no one other than IBM had shipped a top-tier Power ISA desktop in over 12 years.

Now we have not only a Power ISA CPU that is performance-competitive with current x86_64 offerings, but an entire third-party libre workstation built around them that you can order and get shipped to your house right now. The cost of a full Talos II only seems steep until you consider how much a Xeon box in the same ballpark will run you, and the delta seems much more reasonable then. If Blackbird is successful at establishing a "low end" POWER9 machine with a more amenable price, we could see Power ISA start to become a major desktop player once again, especially as the software support situation continues to improve by leaps and bounds and people realize what a liability blackboxes like Intel Management Engine are. Even if you're not in the market for a T2 right now, you'll be more likely to have a real choice in workstations when you do. And that's good news for everybody.

Seems like IBM could have mentioned that.