I’m a POWER user

This article provides a subjective history of POWER and open source from the viewpoint of an open source developer, outlines a few trends and conclusions, and previews what the future will bring. It is based on my talk at the annual OpenPOWER North America Summit, in which I aimed to show the importance of desktop/workstation-class hardware available to developers. In this article, I will cover a few additional topics, including cloud resources available to POWER developers, as well as a glimpse into the products and technologies under development.

The biggest problem for POWER that I can see at the moment is that the kind of POWER processors you want - little endian - are expensive. This precludes more affordable desktops from entering the market, let alone even laptops. Big endian POWER processors aren't exactly future-proof, as Linux distributions are dropping support for them.

It's a difficult situation, but I don't think there's much that can be done about it.