IBM POWER looks to be the most performant libre computing platform in existence, but $4100 for Raptor Engineering's Talos is still too pricey for me -- I'd suggest US$1000 to US$1500 for plain ATX motherboard + CPU, supporting affordable standard commercial consumer components is probably the point where crowd funding is viable as a desktop computer for regular software engineers and tinkerers (well the kind of people who seriously consider buying a Novena).

But Talos is expensive as it uses a custom board, with custom open-source firmware at relatively low volume, so a more affordable Talos desktop is probably infeasible.

I guess for that it needs to be a desktop (not a workstation) -- so a much more stripped down system dropping expensive components such as the FPGAs that a secure internet connected server, or a typical software engineer's desktop don't need.

In other IBM POWER news, Google has recently announced it's Open Compute Project POWER9 server -- the Zaius P9 Server: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709995