[shrek]

I'm very excited for RISC-V but I heard something about the vector specs not being finalized yet so I'm holding off on buying any of the developer hardware (which is also very expensive right now for what it is). Hopefully we'll see a Raspberry Pi form factor board with similar I/O for under 100 USD that can run Linux and the BSDs. Another thing on my wish list are standard PC form factor boards like mITX with socketed memory that I can build a workstation around. I have spare DDR4 modules and NVMe SSDs in storage 

[K22]

MIPS is in decline and has been for a while. Most of the high-visibility MIPS product families - Broadcom Sibyte, XLP, Octeon - have been superseded by faster ARM64 replacements, and MIPS Inc has announced a strategic commitment to RISC-V. Even prior to that, I'm fairly sure ARC shipped more cores per year than MIPS did.

As for the original poster - what about 390/z, still produced by multiple vendors? PPC? Sunway? About 8000 different embedded and accelerator ISAs?

[Raion]

Embedded chips are cool and all, but MIPS is dead. There's no getting around that. There's no uarches planned, everything out there is legacy installations for routers and other small scale devices. A network chip doesn't make a good CPU for a computer, look at the trash that is Sparc T1-3.

Right now, as much as I have some dislike, Apple has some of the fastest chips on the market. Even faster in ST than POWER9 or the latest and greatest x86. For $700, the mini is a bargain, just is a shame that it's only fully supported on macOS. That doesn't mean I'm gonna rush out and buy one, mind you. I don't need a locked down system like that. I'm poor, especially compared to many of you here, so even a $1300 Blackbird is a huge investment.

POWER10 of 2018 is different than 2021 POWER10 at this point, and unfortunately there's more concerns about the openness of the hardware. For me, POWER is where it is at, but it is hard to argue with the power of ARM. It's insane a decade ago it wasn't anywhere near this powerful. x86 will slowly die unless someone innovates, really. The current dev cycles of AMD and Intel aren't producing results.

[Irinikus]

There actually is, and it’s called the quantum computer!