RISC-V is excellent for hobbyist boards, mobile CPUs, high-efficiency low-performance servers, as a base for DSPs, high-efficiency network equipment, etc. Everything from the DSP in your phone to a Rasperry Pi to a Macbook Air.
POWER8 is excellent for high-performance computing, supercomputers, and workstations (Talos[1] when?! :( ). Things like CAPI, Nvlink, etc—stuff that's well outside the scope of RISC-V (though I suppose you could make an ISA targeting HPC based on the RISC-V base integer ISA, but it would only tangentially resemble RISC-V by the time you're done).
Personally I'm looking forward to using both of them in the future!
You could use RISC-V in those POWER8 applications with a suitable implementation. I don't think it would be POWER and probably be only a fraction of it. Just so much careful optimization and design in POWER at ISA and implementation level for number crunching. Yet, an Octeon III-like implementation of RISC-V esp w/ accelerators for SIMD/MIMD or onboard GPU could kill a lot of Intel and POWER processors in performance while getting us close to top contenders.
POWER has been overpriced for too long. From my past looks at catalogs, paying $3,700 today would be a steal to get a high-performance, POWER workstation. Not necessarily competitive price/performance with Intel but certainly with older RISC workstations.
How does Apple's A9X compare to a Xeon E7?
RISC-V is excellent for hobbyist boards, mobile CPUs, high-efficiency low-performance servers, as a base for DSPs, high-efficiency network equipment, etc. Everything from the DSP in your phone to a Rasperry Pi to a Macbook Air.
POWER8 is excellent for high-performance computing, supercomputers, and workstations (Talos[1] when?! :( ). Things like CAPI, Nvlink, etc—stuff that's well outside the scope of RISC-V (though I suppose you could make an ISA targeting HPC based on the RISC-V base integer ISA, but it would only tangentially resemble RISC-V by the time you're done).
Personally I'm looking forward to using both of them in the future!
1. https://raptorengineeringinc.com/TALOS/prerelease.php