3 ms·

Quick benchmark, compared to this one Intel Xeon E5-1620v2 4c/8t 3,7 GHz+/3,9 GHz+ [0] #Intel sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=100000 --num-threads=8 run

• Koahku 12y ago
  Pretty impressive I wonder what the temps look like and how it would perform at 3D rendering and video encoding.
  • bonif 12y ago
    I would be really interested for a database server, right now they offer a single ssd (no RAID), this is a no-go for a production db.
    • nicolaslm 12y ago
      Not exactly, it says "Local RAID" on the Power8 lab page. So it's a RAID of HDD.
      • bonif 12y ago
        yes, I forgot it is actually a single virtual machine running on a physical server. The main disk is /dev/vda2
  • gsnedders 12y ago
    They run hot. Yes, they've been improving on heat output and power consumption, but they're certainly not anywhere near most Intel parts — that said, they're chasing a market where perf matters above all else. Video encoding probably wouldn't be so great comparatively, in large part because I don't think any encoders use the POWER8 vector stuff.
• bradleyland 12y ago
  Wow, that seems almost unbelievable. Power 8 is able to beat Intel architecture by a factor of 0.3 at the same level of concurrency? Can someone offer an explanation of how/why this happens, but we're not all running Power architecture on our servers?
  • en4bz 12y ago
    One reason would be that power uses 8 way smt while Intel (with hyper threading) uses 2 way smt. If your code has tons of cache misses you will gain greatly from 8way smt since another thread can run on the physical core while other threads are waiting for memory. I suspect PPC would do very poorly with High performance code with low cache misses. However for something like a Java program where cache misses are abundant I would expect to see a big boost in performance. The benchmarks above are therefore completely dependant on the cache size.
    • CountHackulus 12y ago
      I worked with the people at IBM who did optimization work for Java on Power. The ridiculous amount of work they did was amazing. There's dozens upon dozens of compiler papers and presentations that are more or less power specific. It was an exciting, and stressful, thing to be a part of.
    • PhuFighter 12y ago
      I think if you look closely at the specs, I think the Xeon has about 2.5MB of L3 per core, while P8 has about 8MB of L3/core. There are bigger differences than this. But the examples above have both processors set at SMT2 (~30 seconds vs ~10 seconds). Differences are greater for SMT4 and SMT8. Of course, if your code fits nicely into the L3 - e.g. if your hot code consumes 3MB, then Power8 will be a bigger winner since there may be more thrashing for the x86 chip - unless, of course, the prediction routines is straight forward and the cacheline can be prefetched (think sequential access vs random access). From what I saw elsewhere, highly parallel code runs faster on P8, where as single thread perf is faster on x86. So if your HPC app is basically single threaded on one of your compute nodes, then that would be faster. But if your HPC code is highly multithreaded on the core, then P8 may surprise you.