Yes if you need more memory bandwidth, POWER is where its at. OTHO, as I've been saying the base cores don't do as well on single threaded loopy or problems wit

Yes if you need more memory bandwidth, POWER is where its at. OTHO, as I've been saying the base cores don't do as well on single threaded loopy or problems with a decent L1/L2 cache hit rate. The specint_rate numbers look good because of the x8 threading, the single core results probably don't look that good. So for many workloads it won't be that great. For the one I was working on out of the box, the power was 1/2 as fast. But that wasn't fair because we had a couple highly optimized x86 code paths. Doing some basic POWER optimizations brought the performance in line with the x86. But on some benchmarks it would win, and lose on others. So while we utilized a _LOT_ of memory/IO bandwidth the fact that there was nearly 2.5x available in the power system over our E5 didn't give us enough of a boost to make it worth the higher price tag (nearly 3x in our case, cause we were comparing with a supermicro machine). Maybe this newer power machine changes that a little.