Re:IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm
by my123 on Thursday April 02, 2026 @11:29AM
(#47615794)
After Power9, IBM became uncompetitive multi-core performance against mainstream server CPUs - both x86 and Arm. They didn't keep up with the rise in core counts.
And the single thread side isn't that good either, but SMT8 is a quite nice software licensing trick
The recent generations of IBM POWER CPUs have not been designed for good single-thread performance but only for excellent multi-threaded performance.
So I believe that an ARM CPU from a flagship smartphone should be much faster in single thread that any existing IBM POWER CPU.
On the other hand, I do not know if there exists any ARM-based server CPU that can match the multi-threaded performance of the latest IBM POWER CPUs.
At least for some workloads the performance of the ARM-based CPUs must be much lower, as the IBM CPUs have huge cache memories and very fast memory and I/O interfaces.
The ARM-based server CPUs should win in performance per watt (due to using recent TSMC processes vs. older Samsung processes) and in performance per dollar, but not in absolute performance.