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
"Per Core" Integer Performance: 7-Zip
The profile of a compression algorithm is somewhat similar to many server workloads: it can be hard to extract instruction level parallelism (ILP) and it's sensitive to memory parallelism and latency. The instruction mix is a bit different, but it's still somewhat similar to many server workloads. Testing single threaded is also a great way to check how well the turbo boost feature works in a CPU.
We ran this benchmark on the POWER8 a few months ago, but there are several reasons to do this again. First of all, we can now use GCC 4.9.2, which has specific support for POWER8 (-mcpu=power8). It is good to note that POWER8 is not a radical new design compared to POWER7. So we only expect modest gains from the compiler.
Secondly, last time we ran on top of PowerKVM, inside a virtual machine. Although that should not make a big difference either - as the benchmark runs almost completely (99%) in user modus and thus runs at 100% - it's still worthwhle to rule out the influence of the virtual machine.
So we recompiled the 7-Zip source code on every machine with the -O3 optimization with GCC 4.9.2.
It is important to note that Intel is extremely aggressive with Turbo-boost on the Xeon E5-2699v3. Running code on one core causes the 2.3 GHz Xeon to boost to 3.6 GHz. As a result, the typical clockspeed advantage of the POWER8 was minimized to a measly 90 MHz, with the POWER8 CPUs boosting from 3.425 GHz to 3.690 GHz.
We found that the POWER8 needs more than one thread to deliver good performance: with one thread we only achieve 62% of the performance of a Haswell core at the same speed. Using the mcpu=power8 compiler flag did little more than boost the performance by 1-3%, which is within the margin of error of this benchmark. So your (occassional?) single threaded code will fare badly on POWER8.
Once you fire off 8 threads however, the POWER8 CPU outperforms the hyperthreaded Haswell core slightly (4%).
How about decompression which is even more (IPC) unfriendly to our brainiacs?
With a single thread, performance of a POWER8 core is about 25% slower than a Haswell core. The Haswell core is still clearly better in extracting Instruction Level Parallelism out of this ILP-unfriendly code. However, let there be no mistake about the integer crunching power of POWER8: it delivers 35% higher performance than the hyperthreaded Xeon E5, core per core, clock per clock (give or take a few MHz).
Compression depends more on the datacache and OoO engine. It is remarkable that the Haswell core with its smaller L1-datacache does a lot better than the POWER8. The many unpredictable branches of the decompression code underutilize these very wide modern cores, and as a result the SMT-8 capable POWER8 outperforms the dual-threaded (SMT-2) Haswell. Notice that running two threads instead one thread on the POWER8 offers 61% better performance. Running 8 threads delivers 2.4x higher performance, a clear indication that the POWER8 CPU has a very wide integer execution engine, but can only deliver if enough threads are active.
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psychobriggsy - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
So you are complaining that your job's selection of hardware has made you earn twice as much?dgingeri - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
No, because I don't earn twice as much. I'm not fully trained in AIX, so I have to muddle my way through dealing with the test machines we have. We don't use them for full production machines, just for testing software for our customers. (Which means I have to reinstall the OS on at least one of those machines about every month or so. That is a BIG pain in the behind due to the boot procedure. Where it takes a couple hours to reinstall Windows or Linux, it takes a full day to do it on an AIX machine.)I'm trying to advise people to NOT use AIX. It's an awful operating system. I'm also advising people NOT use IBM Power based machines because they are extremely aggravating to work on. Overall, it costs much more to run IBM Power machines, even if they aren't running AIX, than it does to run x86 machines. The up front cost might look competitive, but the maintenance costs are huge. Running AIX on them makes it an order of magnitude more expensive.
serpint - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
I suggest reading the NIM A-Z handbook. It shouldn't take you more than 10 minutes to fully deploy an AIX system fully built and installed with software. As with Linux, it also shouldn't take more than about 10 minutes to install and fully deploy a server if you have any experience scripting installs.The developerworks community inside IBM is possibly the best free resource you could hope for. Also the redbooks.ibm.com site.
Compared to most *NIX flavors, AIX is UNIX for dummies.
agtcovert - Tuesday, November 10, 2015 - link
If you had a NIM server setup and were using LPARs, loading a functional image of AIX should take 10 minutes flat, on a 1G network.If you're loading AIX on a physical machine without using the virtualization, you're wasting the server.
agtcovert - Tuesday, November 10, 2015 - link
I've worked on AIX platforms extensively for about the same amount of time. First, most of these purchases go through a partner and yours must've sucked because we got great support from our IBM partner -- free training, access to experts, that sort of thing.Second, I always love the complaining about the cost of the hardware, etc. If you're buying big iron Power servers, the maintenance cost should be near irrelevant. And again, your partner should take care to negotiate that into the deal for 3-5 years ensuring you have access to updates.
The other thing no one ever talks about is *why* you buy these servers. Why do they take so long to boot? Well, for the frame it self, it's a deep POST. But then, mine were never rebooted in 4 years, and that's for firmware upgrades (online) and a couple of interface card swaps (also done online with no service disruption). Do that on x86. So reason #1 -- RAS, at the hardware level. Seriously, how often did you need to reboot the frame?
Reason #2 -- for large enterprises, you can do so much with these with relatively few cores they lead to huge licensing savings in Oracle, IBM software. For us, it was over $1m a year ongoing. And no, switching to other software was not an option. We could run an Oracle RAC on 4 cores of Power 7 (at the time) versus the 32 x86 it was on previously. That saves a lot of $.
The machine reviewed does not run AIX. It's Linux only. So the maintenance, etc. you mention isn't even relevant.
There are still things that are annoying I suppose. AIX is steeped in legacy to some degree, and certainly not as easy to manage as a Linux box. But there are a lot of guides out there for free -- it took me about a month to be fully productive. And the support costs you pay for -- well, if I ran into a wall, I just opened a PMR. IBM was always helpful
nils_ - Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - link
I'm mostly working in Linux Devops now, but I remember dreading to use all the "classic" Unix machines at my first "real" job 12 years ago. We ran a few IRIX and AIX boxes which were ancient along itself. Hell even the first thing I did on my work Macbook was to replace the BSD userland with GNU wherever possible.It's hard to find any information on them and any learning materials are expensive and usually on dead trees. They pretty much want to sell training, consulting etc. along with the often non-competitive Hardware prices since these companies don't actually WANT to sell hardware. They want to sell everything that surrounds it.
retrospooty - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
The problem with server chips is that its about platform stability. IBM (and others) dropped off the face of the Earth and as mentioned above Intel now has 95% of the market. This chip looks great but will companies buy into it in mass? What if IBM makes another choice to drop off the face of the Earth again and your platform is dead ended? I would have to think long and hard about going with them at this point.FunBunny2 - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
Not likely. the mainframe z machines are built using POWER blocks.Kevin G - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
POWER and System Z are two different architectures. Case in point, POWER is a RISC design introduced in the 90's where as the System Z mainframes can trace their roots to a CISC design from the 1960's (and it is still possible to run some of that 1960's code unmodified).They do share a handful of common parts (think the CDIMMs) to cut down on support costs.
plonk420 - Friday, November 6, 2015 - link
can you run an x264 benchmark on it?? x)