Indeed, we are considering both, but from my point of view I do not see a Power9 laptop. The Power9 has been around (and the whole Power architecture) has been around for a very ling time now and IBM’s policy of allowing third party use of the architecture has always been “challenging”. With Power you are basically 100% dependent on IBM and their good will. RISC-V on the other hand is completely open, anyone can pick it up and crank out chips using the ISA and/or based on the freely available designs. It frees us from the lock in to one single provider’s blessing.
I just visited the RISC-V summit in Santa Clara (CA) and talked to the SiFive guys. According to them we will see a lot more RISC-V silicon becoming available in 2019 - also more powerful silicon that can run Linux! There will be a lot more silicon for smaller systems, like microcontrollers for IOT, AI machine control etc.
So I think the RISC-V ecosystem is taking off soon and for mobile devices I would rather bet on RISC-V than on the Power9. For home or small business server like applications I can see the Power9. We will have to see what 2019 brings.
What I can assure you is that we are watching all of these developments very closely and it is in our very natural interest to adopt more free CPU architectures as soon as we possibly can.
Cheers
nicole