A hypothetical PC build with an exorbitantly expensive POWER9 CPU and motherboard

[SPARC]

A company called Raptor Computing Systems sells motherboards and POWER9 processors that can range into the thousands, because it’s server and enterprise level hardware. 
 

I ain’t made of money, but if I could build a workstation or server for no other reason than its price and austerity, I would probably use those.

 

But then that begs the question of being able to host server software on POWER architecture when most of it has been developed for x86 or ARM, like a Java Minecraft server. And whether the cost of the hardware is justified being its potential limitations. And software that translates x86 code to POWER code, something I haven’t really seen yet.

 

Someone from another forum said:

Quote

don't. It's absolute dogs***. They exist, imo, primarily because lots of companies have legacy tech still married to that architecture or AIX and want to at least somewhat modernize the performance.

They're insane power hogs, they never beat the competition, and they're expensive as all hell.

If not POWER then I’ll probably be looking for an ARM server/workstation board, but I can’t find them outside of expensive server hardware.

[Electronics Wizardy]

There are emulators on linux that will let you run x86 vms, but slowly.

 

Java should be fine as its not precompiled, but there may be weird issues.

 

Did you look at the phoronox reviews and benchmarks? There probably the best source out there.

 

But overall unless you need power, get x86, its faster for most uses and more efficent.

[SPARC]

11 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

There are emulators on linux that will let you run x86 vms, but slowly.

 

Java should be fine as its not precompiled, but there may be weird issues.

 

Did you look at the phoronox reviews and benchmarks? There probably the best source out there.

 

But overall unless you need power, get x86, its faster for most uses and more efficent.

Haven’t looked at the reviews yet.

 

Then there is the option of taking one of IBM’s POWER cores on GitHub and putting it on an FPGA, but probably just for hobbyist use rather than practical.