Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 2: Server Applications on OpenPOWER
by Johan De Gelas on September 15, 2016 8:01 AM ESTEnergy Consumption
A large part of the server market is very sensitive to performance-per-watt. That includes the cloud vendors/hosts. For a smaller part of the market, top performance is more important than the performance/watt ratio. Indeed, for financial trading, big data analyses, large databases, and most HPC servers, total performance is the top priority. Energy consumption should not be outrageous, but it is not the most important concern.
We tested the energy consumption of our servers for a one-minute period in several situations. The first one is the point where the tested server performs best in MySQL: the highest throughput just before the response time goes up significantly. Then we look at the point where throughput is the highest (no matter what response time). This is the situation where the CPU is fully loaded.
| SKU | TDP (on paper) spec |
Idle Server W |
MySQL Best Throughput at Lowest Resp. Time (W) |
MySQL Max Throughput (W) |
Transaction /s |
Tr/watt |
| IBM POWER8 S812LC | 190 W | 221 | 259 | 260 | 14482 | 55 |
| Xeon E5-2699 v4 | 145 W | 67 | 213 | 235 | 18997 | 89 |
| Xeon E5-2690 v3 | 135 W | 84 | 249 | 254 | 11741 | 47 |
Throughput and single threaded performance were the priorities for designing POWER8. Power consumption stood probably much lower on the list, way behind RAS. The idle power shows us that you should not use the POWER8 in applications that run at low load for long periods.
Intel's "Broadwell-EP" (Xeon E5 v4), by comparison, is the clear victor when it comes to performance per watt, and even without looking at Intel's background, it's clear from the data alone that more thought was put into that aspect.
However, considering that the POWER8 was launched around the same time as Intel Haswell, IBM's multicore delivers a lot of integer performance per watt of energy it consumes. In fact, despite the power gobbling Centaur chips, despite the fact that MySQL is not the most POWER8 optimized application, IBM's medium range POWER8 is capable of defeating Intel's Haswell. While this is less relevant to the server buyer today, it does show that IBM's engineering capabilities are competitive with Intel, which is good news for the upcoming POWER9 chip. The POWER9 chip will be the first POWER chip which has specific SKUs for the affordable scale out servers.
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PowerOfFacts - Friday, September 16, 2016 - link
trollBOMBOVA - Friday, October 7, 2016 - link
Rich info , good scoutPowerOfFacts - Friday, September 16, 2016 - link
Sigh ....PowerOfFacts - Friday, September 16, 2016 - link
That's strange, this site says you can buy a POWER8 server for $4800. https://www.ibm.com/marketplace/cloud/big-data-inf...Screwed up Power (so many times)? Please explain? Compared to what....SPARC? Itanium? If you are talking about those platforms, POWER has 70% of that marketshare. Do you mean against "Good Enough" Intel? Absolutely Intel is the market leader but only in share as it isn't in innovation. Power still delivers enterprise features for AIX and IBM i customers with features Intel could only dream about. Where the future of the data center is going with Linux, well it did take IBM a while to figure out they couldn't do it their way. Now, they are committed 100% (from my perspective as a non-IBMer while also being committed to AIX & IBM i as their is a solid install base there) which we all see in the form of IBM & even non-IBM solutions built by OpenPOWER partners and ISV solutions using little endian Linux. Yes, there are some workloads that require extra work to optimize but for those already optimized or those which can be optimized, those customers can now buy a server for less money that has the potential to outperform Intel by up to 2X, in a system using innovative technology (CAPI & NVLink) that is more reliable. I don't know, IBM may be late and Power has some work to do but I really don't think you can back up your statement that "IBM has screwed up power so many times". Latest OpenPOWER Summit was a huge success. Here is a Google interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0qTLlvUB-s&fe...
Oh, but you were probably just trying to be clever and take a few competitive shots.
CajunArson - Saturday, September 17, 2016 - link
Yeah, that $4800 Power server wasn't nearly equivalent to what was benchmarked in this review with the "midrange" server that costs over $11K on the same web page you cited.I could build an 8 or 12 core Xeon that would put the hurt on that low-end Power box for less money and continue to save money during every minute of operation.
JohanAnandtech - Saturday, September 17, 2016 - link
" it will cost anywhere from 5-10X" . What do you base this on? Several SKUs of IBM are in the $1500 range. "Something like $10K for the processor". This seems to be about the high-end. The E7s are in the $4.6-7k range. Even if IBM would charge $10k for the high end CPUs, it is nowhere near being 5x more expensive. Unless I am missing something, you seem to have missed that IBM has a scale out range and is offering much more affordable OpenPOWER CPUs.jesperfrimann - Wednesday, September 21, 2016 - link
IMHO, the place where POWER servers make sense right now, is for use with IBM software. So if you are using something DB2 or WebSphere, where the real cost is the Software licenses.Then it's really a Nobrainer. Not that your local IBM sales Guy will like that you'll do a switch to a Linux@Power solution :)
// Jesper
YukaKun - Thursday, September 15, 2016 - link
For the Java tests, did you change the GC collector settings? Also, why only 24GB for the JVM? I run JBoss with 32GB across our servers. I'd use more, but they still have issues with going to higher levels.Cheers!
madwolfa - Thursday, September 15, 2016 - link
Unless working with huge datasets you want to keep your JVM heap size as reasonably low as possible... otherwise there would be a penalty on GC performance. Granted, with this sort of hardware it would be pretty minuscule, but the general rule of thumb still applies...JohanAnandtech - Thursday, September 15, 2016 - link
No changes to the GC Collector settings. 24 GB for VM = 4x 24 GB + 4x 3 GB for Transaction Injector and 2 GB for the controllor = +/- 110 GB memory. We wanted to run it inside 128 GB as most of our DIMMs are 16 GB at DDR4-2400/2133.