rbullo's Journal: Which platform should I choose?

Driven by my desire to explore new systems, as well as Microsoft's Palladium initiative, I recently decided to check out the alternatives to the aging x86 architecture - namely PowerPC, SPARC, and Alpha. But after checking out the websites, it seems that these are too expensive for blind experimentation. So I went to Google to find some comparison charts. I had no luck here. The best thing I could turn up was this, which seems very biased toward PPC. So it seems that Slashdot is the only other place I can turn. Could any of you direct me to a good comparison of the different architectures, or post one here?