I concur; while I think it's great to see these POWER systems get some press I think that this article in particular puts forth the wrong set of priorities, addresses speed unfairly in more than one way, and presents unreasonable conclusions in the end. That these qualities are addressed in the article doesn't transform poor choices into reasonable choices, or unfairness into informative review.

The benchmarks seem unfair to me because they compare code that either in code choice (specific instruction sets) or algorithm design could favor the Intel/AMD systems. Larabel addresses this but still publishes these results as if we could use them as a reasonable baseline for future comparisons when the software is optimized for POWER systems.

Also on performance, I imagine most computer users will find that any modern computer will do what they need it to do quickly enough to get real work done. Check out the videos this POWER system team put together for their other systems (systems that aren't radically different from this one) like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05NNFJj3Mrw (use youtube-dl or avideo to avoid running YouTube's nonfree software) or at https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/op_ue4_gl.php ; you'll see games run well, multi-monitor setups run well; and users can expect to get plenty of work done. The bottleneck is usually elsewhere: how quickly a server gives the user data, how much space the computer has to store data (either in RAM or permanent storage), and other more complex delays imposed by some other part of a process well beyond one's own computer. Most computer users simply don't do tasks akin to what's being tested here. The most mathematically challenging thing they do is decode video and that's often designed to be faster than encoding that same video. Even video encoding is somewhat overrated as this is typically done far fewer times than decoding that same video. One can't get a computer fast enough to avoid purchasing many computers to do large encoding jobs; it's not a matter of switching to some modern Intel/AMD system.

As you said, the respect for privacy and software freedom is underrated to a fault in this Phoronix article. I'm also disappointed in how readily the readership that posts about this article buys right into the framing of the debate around performance and ignores or minimizes the importance of software freedom and respect for privacy. By the metric of software freedom -- which systems respect a user's software freedom? -- modern Intel/AMD chipsets simply fail. There's no contest but there's plenty to talk about and teach about. Intel/AMD systems come with backdoors (pitched as sysadmin conveniences) we are prohibited from altering thus preventing most computer users from truly owning their computers, regardless of programmatic skill or desire. Larabel acknowledges this in a paragraph toward the end but that hardly gives this important issue its due attention. Particularly when one buys a computer they'll use for years, making a bad decision here pays off for those who want to spy on you for years to come regardless of which OSes are run atop that system. Finally, I think those that discount the importance of privacy are flatly lying; everyone has something to hide and most people reading this rely on networked computing in their daily lives. It's critical we have computers we can trust for all of our computing needs.