It's a lower-end part, but regardless, POWER9 isn't really anything special in terms of instruction throughput / calculations (it's only got 4-wide SIMD for exa

It's a lower-end part, but regardless, POWER9 isn't really anything special in terms of instruction throughput / calculations (it's only got 4-wide SIMD for example), and its FP performance is not great. Where it really shines compared to x86/64 is memory bandwidth / throughput.