The Power9 processor that IBM is working on in conjunction with hyperscale and HPC customers could be the most important chip that Big Blue has brought to market since the Power4 processor back in 2001. That was another world, back then, with the dot-com boom having gone bust and enterprises looking for a less expensive but beefy NUMA server on which to run big databases and transaction processing systems. The world that the Power9 processor will enter in 2017 is radically changed. A two-socket system has more compute, memory, and I/O capacity and bandwidth than those behemoths from a decade and a half ago delivered, and while NUMA systems are still important, distributed architectures now rule the datacenter for most workloads, and fat nodes comprised of a mix of processors and accelerators, rather than big CPU-only NUMA clusters, are becoming more common as companies try to create flexible and yet powerful compute complexes to address a wide variety of workloads. As the variety and complexity of Intel's own processor roadmap attests, the age of general purpose computing, where a few CPU SKUs covered the bases, is pretty much over.