Buying the perfect hardware for your workload works really well when you have a couple million boxes to run it. POWER9 has the insanely fast NVLink to connect to specialized silicon Google has enough volume to design and build.
Where it can make a substantial dent in the x86 server is precisely this HPC niche. A 10% faster $300 box is worth $30 more, hardly enough to warrant extra work, but a 10% faster $10 million dollar machine is worth a million more.
Where it can make a substantial dent in the x86 server is precisely this HPC niche. A 10% faster $300 box is worth $30 more, hardly enough to warrant extra work, but a 10% faster $10 million dollar machine is worth a million more.