It's still an entry barrier. I can develop the software that'll run on the NVidia box on my $2000 Xeon workstation and have a reasonable expectation the $125K box will behave as expected.

While I trust POWER9 to be very fast, I have had odd performance differences (both positive - meaning I overspent in hardware and had some explaining to do - and negative - meaning I was too optimistic and had some explaining to do) when moving from x86 to SPARC, Itanium and POWER (and MIPS - I'm that old).

The Talon are good entry level POWER9 systems for reasonable prices, but I'd love to see parts trickling down to Xeon E5 prices.

If the barrier of entry is too high, only what already runs on POWER8 will move to POWER9. Xeons have good cost/performance and are a safer bet.