The Intel Xeon E7-8800 v3 Review: The POWER8 Killer?
by Johan De Gelas on May 8, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- IT Computing
- Intel
- Xeon
- Haswell
- Enterprise
- server
- Enterprise CPUs
- POWER
- POWER8
7-Zip Decompression
Up next, let's see how the chips compare in decompression. Decompression is an even lower IPC workload, as it is very branch intensive and depends on the latencies of the multiply and shift instructions.
The slightly higher clock of "Ivy Bridge EX" is enough to keep up with "Haswell EX".
Meanwhile, once again the Haswell core proves to be a bit more capable. It sustains 20% higher IPC with one thread. But run 8 threads inside the most powerful RISC core ever, and the POWER8 beats the XEON E7 by a massive margin: it is almost 50% (!) faster. Wow. Don't believe it? see below.
Now, in defense of Intel, decompression has an exotic instruction mix. You should optimize for the common case, not for exotic software. So we were told by the RISC vendors 30 years ago...
Want more POWER8 benchmarks? Unfortunately we'll have to dissapoint you. The limited server we tested on was not able to run any of our server workloads as we only had one core and less than 2 GB to work with.
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PowerTrumps - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
I'm sure the author will update the article unless this was a Intel cheerleading piece.name99 - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
The thing is called E7-8890. Not E7-5890?WTF Intel? Is your marketing team populated by utter idiots? Exactly what value is there in not following the same damn numbering scheme that your product line has followed for the past eight years or so?
Something like that makes the chip look like there's a whole lot of "but this one goes up to 11" thinking going on at Intel...
name99 - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
OK, I get it. The first number indicates the number of glueless chips, not the micro-architecture generation. Instead we do that (apparently) with a v2 or v3 suffix.I still claim this is totally idiotic. Far more sensible would be to use the same scheme as the other Intel processors, and use a suffix like S2, S4, S8 to show the glueless SMP capabilities.
ZeDestructor - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
They've been using this convention since Westmere-EX actually, at which point they ditched their old convention of a prefix letter for power tier, followed by one digit for performance/scalability tier, followed by another digit for generation then the rest for individual models. Now we have 2xxx for dual socket, 4xxx for quad socket and 8xxx for 8+ sockets, and E3/E5/E7 for the scalability tier. I'm fine with either, though I have a slight preference for the current naming scheme because the generation is no longer mixed into the main model number.Morawka - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
man the power 8 is a beefy cpu... all that cache, you'd think it would walk all over intel.. but intel's superior cpu design winsPowerTrumps - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
please explaintsk2k - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
Where are the gaming benchmarks?JohanAnandtech - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
Is there still a game with software rendering? :-)Gigaplex - Sunday, May 10, 2015 - link
Llvmpipe on Linux gives a capable (feature wise) OpenGL implementation on the CPU.Klimax - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
Don't see POWER getting anywhere with that kind of TDP. There will be dearth of datacenters and other hosting locations retooling for such thing. And I suspect not many will even then take it as cooling and power costs will be damn too high.Problem is, IBM can't go lower with TDP as architecture features enabling such performance are directly responsible for such TDP. (Just L1 consumes 2W to keep few cycles latency at high frequency)