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Comment by JLO64 | Hacker News Reader

I hate phrasing a question like this, but I would genuinely like to know who the customer for this architecture is. My understanding is that cloud (and for that matter consumer) is all x86/ARM.

So is it science/defense that makes up their user base? I have an acquaintance who works at NASA mention that IBM stuff was really good for processing large amounts of data fast. Is that their primary advantage over other architectures?

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Raptor Systems makes a bunch of ATX compatible POWER motherboards. As to who buys them, it's not entirely clear. If they were a little cheaper, I'd pick one up in a heartbeat. $3,000 for a CPU and motherboard is a bit hard to rationalize for what's effectively just nerding out though: https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html .

For the embedded market, NXP makes a bunch of QorIQ chips based around the POWER ISA - mostly for telecom products. These are actually reasonably common in certain devices, but not really what you'd want in a desktop.

raptor is still on power9 chips from 2017, I have one, but it's not a reasonable purchase unless you're a very very serious open source believer

My understanding is there's issues around POWER10 that stopped it from being adopted: https://www.talospace.com/2021/09/its-not-just-omi-thats-tro... . For me personally, having worked enough with embedded POWER chips to get weirdly comfortable with ISA, given the choice, I'd love to have a system like this to write pure ASM stuff on. Not for any practical reason in the slightest; pretty much in the same spirit of souping up a go kart.

On that note, out of curiosity, how do these compare with x86 and ARM chips from that era?

I was hoping TFA might have news to indicate if any of that was addressed in POWER11... but doesn't seem to.

From the sound of it, it might be: https://www.talospace.com/2025/07/power11-hits-market-this-m... .

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.

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?

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.

IBM pulled out of the HPC market several years ago.

Fed Gov, State Gov, mil, industrial, transportation, banking, etc.

It's customers that never migrated to x86/ARM.

The last I checked most of the supporting mainframe systems use POWER. For example the DASD storage devices are all using POWER CPUs.

mainframes

edit: thought some ibm mainframes used power in helper roles.

Power isn't a mainframe.

Hm, I thought some of the peripheral controllers in IBM mainframes used power, guess i was wrong.

I think you meant to say "mainframe isn't a customer" ? Power architecture runs almost exclusively on mainframes.

Correction - POWER architecture runs exclusively on 'i' and 'p' series. 'z' series is mainframe.

That still isn't correct.

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