[doctorshady]

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.

[Palomides]

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

[doctorshady]

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?

[TheAmazingRace]

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.

[Fade_Dance]

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?