Anton Ertl <
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
So let's look at SPEC CPU instead. For CPU2017, I see only four
entries from IBM, all for the Integer Rate metric, two with Power 9
and two with Power 10 CPUs. The highest of those results is:
base peak
1700 2170 IBM Power E1080
That's with 8 sockets, 120 cores, and 960 threads. Looking at other
8-socket machines, I find
base peak
3820 3880 BullSequana SH80
That's with 8 sockets, 480 cores, and 960 threads (similar results
from Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX8770 M7, HPE Compute Scale-up Server 3200,
Inspur TS860G7 and Supermicro SuperServer SYS-681E-TR, all done with
Xeon Platinum 8490H CPUs). And if you go for maximum performance,
there's a 16-socket Xeon machine from Bull with base=7400, peak=7450.
Alternatively, you can instead buy a 2-socket system with similar
performance to the 8-socket IBM Power E1080:
base peak
1950 2140 ASUS RS720A-E12-RS12
and similar results from other systems with the EPYC 9754.
https://www.spec.org/cpu2017/results/res2021q3/cpu2017-20210814-28679.html https://www.spec.org/cpu2017/results/res2024q3/cpu2017-20240701-43944.html https://www.spec.org/cpu2017/results/res2023q2/cpu2017-20230522-36617.html
Admittedly, IBM extracts the most performance from each core, but with
only 15 cores per CPU (where others have 128), that is no longer that impressive. Nevertheless, neither machines with the Ryzen 7950X nor
with the Xeon-E2488 reach the performance per core (and no results for
the Ryzen 9950X have been submitted yet), so it looks like Power 10
has a really good multi-threading implementation.
The fact that IBM has not submitted results for Power for SPEC CPU
2017 for (Int or FP) Speed or FP Rate results is an admission that
their numbers there are even less impressive.
In any case, certainly for the stuff I do I see no reason why I would consider, much less recommend buying a Power machine these days. My
guess is that the major reasons for buying pSeries machines these days
are legacy software and IBM salesmanship.
Several years ago I looked at bus bandwidth of various machnes.
IBM Power had _very_ impressive figures there. If top bus
bandwidth is critical looking at Power is very natural. And
that may be crucial factor for business applications. Admitedly,
for me IBM was and is in "too expensive" category, but they
mainly sell to clients that are not price-sensitive.
--
Waldek Hebisch
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