Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Little Endian

Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by rwmj on Friday July 22, 2016 @06:32AM (#12142743)

My 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.

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Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by cm3 on Friday July 22, 2016 @08:15AM (#12143072)

> Forget benchmarks, it's noticeable at the command line.

What do you mean exactly?

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Re:Assessing IBM's POWER8, Part 1: A Low Level Look at Littl... by rwmj on Friday July 22, 2016 @08:38AM (#12143156)

Well I compile libguestfs (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.

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