Isn't openpower not actually very open? At least with RISCV we can compete vendors while maintaining a compatible instruction set, I'm not sure how many people are going to produce openpower chips.

In the long term, I think you have a point here. It would be nice to have IBM not being the only producer of, say, the POWER15. In that sense RISC-V is substantially more open than OpenPOWER.

But parent was talking about in the immediate timeframe, and right now (and I predict for the next few years at minimum), if you want free(r) and ballpark performance class with x86, then you're going to have to play with POWER. I don't think ARM is there yet with respect to grunt and some ARM designs have some of the same concerns about creepy dark corners of the processor die. It's why there's a Talos II under my desk.

I wanted one of those, just couldn't justify the price. I've been toying with the idea of running Reactos or Haiku on an FPGA as a cheaper "you own it as much as possible" variant.