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
Database Performance: MySQL
Both MySQL and PostgreSQL do not scale well enough to make use of 72 threads (Dual Xeon E5), let alone 160 threads (Dual POWER8). We installed Percona MySQL Server 5.6, which is the most scalable InnoDB based MySQL server.
We used the MySQL Sysbench benchmark, but we limited MySQL with taskset to run on 4 or 8 physical cores. We verified that this was actually the case by running "nmon" on top of the IBM server.
You can clearly see that the first 32 threads are used (CPU 0 - 7).
Sysbench allows us to place an OLTP load on a MySQL test database, and you can chose the regular test or the read-only test. We chose read only as even with solid state storage, Sysbench is quickly disk I/O limited.
We tested with 10 million records and 100,000 requests. The main reason why we tested with Sysbench is to get a huge amount of queries that only select very small parts (a few or one row) of the tables, Sysbench allows you to test with any number of threads you like, but there is no "think time" feature. That means all queries fire off as quickly as possible, so you cannot simulate "light" and "medium" loads.
The response times are very small, which is typical for an OLTP test. To take them into account, we are showing you the highest throughput at around 3-4 ms. As the results tend to vary a bit, we give you the average of three runs.
With only 4 cores active, the Xeon E5-2699 v3 is still running at 3.3 GHz. Once we use 8 cores, the clockspeed lowers to 2.9 GHz, and the POWER8 outperforms the best Xeon by a small margin. However, we are only testing a part of the CPUs, similar to running only one VM. Ultimately what this means is that total performance will be:
- the POWER8 will be around 36k (14400/8 * 20 cores)
- the Xeon E5-2699 v3 will be around 60k (13400/8 * 36 cores)
- the Xeon E5-2695 v3 will be around 45k (13000/8 * 28 cores)
So the current MySQL performance on top of POWER8 is good, but MySQL runs still a lot better on the Xeons.
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joegee - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
It was an awesome community. I learned so much from everyone. I remember the days when we'd write pages arguing whether AMD's new 64 bit extension to x86 was truly 64 bit. The discussions could be heated, but they were seldom rude. I wish there were something similar today. :/Kevin G - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
Aces brings back memories for me as well even though I mainly lurked there.A solid chunk of that group have moved over to RWT.
joegee - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
What is RWT?psychobriggsy - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
Get back to Aces Hardware you!JohanAnandtech - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
Like Ryan said, I have been working 11 years at Anand. In other words, it is great working at Anandtech. AT is one of the few tech sites out there that still values deep analysis and allows the editors to take the time to delve deep.joegee - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
And still writing as well as you ever did! Keep up the good work, Johan!rrossi - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
Dear Johan nice article. Did u ever consider sparse system solving (with preconditioning) as a sensitive benchmark? It is a crucial stage of most scientific applications and it is a bandwidth limited operation with a high degree of parallelism. It would be definitely interesting to see how the power 8 fares on such a test. If you are interested I think I could provide a pointer to a simple benchmark (to be compiled). If you feel it may be interesting just drop me an email.JohanAnandtech - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
Interested... mail me, I don't have your mail. See the author link on top of the article.Ian Cutress - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
I'd also like to be pointed to such a benchmark for workstation style tests on x86. Please email ian@anandtech.com with info :)MartinT - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
Johan's been with Anandtech for more than a decade, and has been publishing on the subject since the late 90s.But I very much second your "Niiiiice!," as reading his name always reminds me of the old days over at aceshardware, and I'm always looking forward to his insights!