The IBM POWER8 Review: Challenging the Intel Xeon
by Johan De Gelas on November 6, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- CPUs
- Enterprise
- Enterprise CPUs
- IBM
- POWER
- POWER8
Multi-Threaded Integer Performance
Let's now take a look at multi-threaded workloads. Using all 18 cores causes the E5-2699 v3 to reduce the clock from 3.6 GHz to 2.8 GHz. Our POWER8 CPU on the other hand only has 10 cores.
The result is of course that the POWER8 cannot keep up with the 18-core Xeon, which runs most of the time at 2.8 GHz. But let's not forget that this is not the top-tier POWER8 CPU, which is the 12-core 3.5 GHz DCM inside the S824. All in all, this is solid performance as the POWER8 edges out a 14-core Xeon running at 2.8 GHz (E5-2695).
With LZMA decompression on the other hand, despite having only 10 cores the POWER8 almost keeps up with the 18-core Xeon running at 2.8 GHz. This is remarkable as it has been a long time since we have this kind of performance from a CPU that cost less than half as much as Intel's most expensive Xeons ($4000+).
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JohanAnandtech - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
Ok, Europe adopt the dot, but maybe the US can adopt the metric system like the rest of the world? :-)bitaljus - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
or better yet recode this site to see from what country u are visiting and use the appropriate denote thousands symbol, appropriate metric system and even time for the viewer. how meany time i was irradiated when i need to google something like this just to make it in local. and this is easy to do in the site natively. (P.S. Sorry for bad English, not native)nils_ - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
The browser already sends a header with Accept-Language, which should be the preferred way to for the web site to determine locale. For example, I live in Germany so my browser will send en, en_UK, en_US, de and DE (this can be set somewhere in the settings). Now you can determine the language and other localisation based upon that, and there are tools where you can set the locale to then display dates, times etc.. based n that.Many sites instead use Geolocation based on the IP address, which can be really awkward when you travel to a country where you can't read the language.
ZeDestructor - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
Even within EU it's not consistent.. UK uses commas for thousands, dot for decimal (and that's why the US and most anglophone countries use the same setup), Germany, Netherlands and France on the other hand favour dots for thousands, commas for decimal, so you see it used there.. and in a great number of their former colonies where the language and culture has stuck.nils_ - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
Dates / Time are even funnier, that's also extremely inconsistent and can be very misleading. Think for examle a date like 12/11/2015, in some countries it'll mean the 12th of November while in others it will mean the 11th of December, and sometimes even the 2015th of November in 11 AD ;)I remember reading on the GTA IV in-game "Internet" a travel guide to Europe that said the months here have 12 days but there are 30 months a year or something to that effect ;)
powchie - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
let Johan do more reviews. been reading his stuff from late 90's and consider him the best then followed by Anand.Ryan Smith - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
Trust me when I say that if I could whip Johan any harder and make him work any faster I would be doing just that.;-)juhatus - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
When the Balrog showed up for work he had everyone fired.ruthan - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
In summary should be something about software support, raw power is here, but software stack isvery limited.
PowerCPU is good for old legacy apps - SAP, Oracle etc.. but otherwise its dead end.
I would like to see comparision of IBM LPAR virtualization against Xeon Vmware solution, or Oracle / MySQL benchmark on power vs. Oracle benchmark on Xeon.
Server with Power even cant to run Crysis, or maybe some QEMU magic..
ruthan - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
Pleas Ad edit button like other civilized sites, i was hurry when i wrote it.