I mean, you probably heard of PowerPC. IBM kept working on that, is still working on it. They’re at Power10 now, but that has some proprietary blobs, as opposed to POWER9.

I’d say that it’s mainly cool because it’s an architecture with enough performance for modern stuff, that is completely open source. No proprietary BIOS, no Management Engine running unknown code. Also, pretty stable, supposedly.

Only supported by Linux, some BSDs, and some proprietary IBM *nixes, if you wanna say you have a system that literally can’t run Windows.

If you want fun facts, the currently 9th most powerful supercomputer, Summit, runs on it, I guess.

The hardware is too expensive for pretty much anyone to actually wanna use it, but oh well, what do you do.

You can get yourself a workstation for about $10k here. https://www.raptorcs.com/content/TL2WK2/intro.html

What about POWER9? You can buy a complete workstation right now, with an open source CPU, Board, BIOS. It’ll cost you an arm, a leg, and probably some more internal organs, but it is currently more functional than RISC-V.

Look at the way Tesla collects and treats customer data, and the way Musk seems to unilaterally abuse his control over the companies he owns for personal reasons.

Now think about the capabilities of the Intel Management Engine that pretty much every Intel CPU requires.

Bad vibes, I say.

For those feeling out of the loop, see here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

Tldr - it’s a little always on processor, running a Minix OS, with direct access to all board devices including the Ethernet Controller.

AMD has something similar in form of their Platform Security Processor.

I know, I know. I was just dreaming of a world where they didn’t suck.

A sensible approach would have been to regulate data collection and misinformation on social media in general, instead of writing a law that bans one specific platform. But oh well, what do I know.

RTX A1000 is a workstation Card, there’s desktop cards with that branding as well. Nvidia has laptop versions of the gaming cards, but the Dell business focused ranges are more marketed for ‘mobile workstation’ type stuff, so they get the workstation cards.