• [CM] IBM's Power 8 chip

    From RS Wood@21:1/5 to All on Thu Jul 28 11:16:32 2016
    XPost: comp.misc

    From the «you know it's powerful cuz the name» department:
    Title: Assessing IBM's POWER8
    Author: Thom Holwerda
    Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 19:02:28 -0400
    Link: http://osnews.com/story/29312/Assessing_IBM_s_POWER8

    It is the widest superscalar processor on the market, one that can issue up to 10 instructions and sustain 8 per clock: IBM's POWER8. IBM's POWER CPUs have always captured the imagination of the hardware enthusiast; it is the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the M1 Abrams of the processor world. Still, despite a flood of benchmarks and reports, it is very hard to pinpoint how it compares to the best Intel CPUs in performance wise. We admit that our own first attempt did not fully demystify the POWER8 either, due to the fact that some immature LE Linux software components (OpenJDK, MySQL...) did not allow us to run our enterprise workloads. Hence we're undertaking another attempt to understand what the strengths and weaknesses are of Intel's most potent challenger. And we have good reasons besides curiosity and geekiness: IBM has just recently launched the IBM S812LC, the most affordable IBM POWER based server ever. IBM advertises the S812LC with "Starting at $4,820". That is pretty amazing if you consider that this is not some basic 1U server, but a high expandable 2U server with 32 (!) DIMM slots, 14 disk bays, 4 PCIe Gen 3 slots, and 2 redundant power supplies. Classic AnandTech. This is only part 1 - more parts are to follow.


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