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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LemmingOverlord - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
Mate... Bite your tongue! Johan is THE man when it comes to Datacenter-class hardware. Obviously he doesn't get the same exposure as teh personal technology guys, but he is definitely one of the best reviewers out there (inside and outside AT).joegee - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
He's been doing class A work since Ace's Hardware (maybe before, I found him on Ace's though.) He is a cut above the rest.nismotigerwvu - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
Johan,I think you had a typo on the first sentence of the 3rd paragraph on page 1.
"After seeing the reader interestin POWER8 in that previous article..."
Nice read overall and if I hadn't just had my morning cup of coffee I would have missed it too.
Ryan Smith - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
Good catch. Thanks!Essence_of_War - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
That performance per watt, it is REALLY hard to keep up with the Xeons there!III-V - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
IBM's L1 data cache has a 3-cycle access time, and is twice as large (64KB) as Intel's, and I think I remember it accounting for something like half the power consumption of the core.Essence_of_War - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
Whoa, neat bit of trivia!JohanAnandtech - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
Interesting. Got a link/doc to back that up? I have not found such detailed architectural info.Henriok - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
Very nice to see tests of non-x86 hardware. It's interesting too se a test of the S822L when IBM just launched two even more price competitive machines, designed and built by Wistron and Tyan, as pure OpenPOWER machines: the S812LC and S822LC. These can't run AIX, and are substantially cheaper than the IBM designed machines. They might lack some features, but they would probably fit nicely in this test. And they are sporting the single chip 12 core version of the POWER8 processor (with cores disabled).DanNeely - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
"The server is powered by two redundant high quality Emerson 1400W PSUs."The sticker on the PSU is only 80+ (no color). Unless the hotswap support comes with a substantial penalty (if so why); this design looks to be well behind the state of the art. With data centers often being power/hvac limited these days, using a relatively low efficiency PSU in an otherwise very high end system seems bizarre to me.