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Does POWER have an advantage in price-performance ratio over Intel? When I say price, it's the TCO, including energy costs.
by kartickv 10y ago
Does POWER have an advantage in price-performance ratio over Intel? When I say price, it's the TCO, including energy costs.
- robin_reala 10y agoLike the article says, it depends on your workload. With this machine and if you’re expecting idle time then no. If they’re under constant load, and given the right type of load, then yes.
- rwmj 10y agoMy take on this is that if you need peak single thread performance and are willing to pay whatever that costs you should consider POWER. If you are at all sensitive about price, or if you can expend development effort parallelizing your work across lower performance cores, you should go with x86. They are different markets for different people. I have access to POWER8 hardware through work and it really does scream. Forget benchmarks, it's noticeable at the command line. Which is nice, but I'm not paying for it.
- cm3 10y ago> Forget benchmarks, it's noticeable at the command line. What do you mean exactly?
- rwmj 10y agoWell I compile libguestfs (http://libguestfs.org/ http://libguestfs.org/) on POWER8 fairly regularly and the compilations just fly past. I haven't benchmarked it, and I'm not allowed to benchmark it because of the NDAs we sign, but it's obviously faster than the Intel machines we have. Because of the single-threaded parts of the build (eg. ./configure), these builds benefit much more than just having lots of cores - Amdahl's law and all that.