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Am I missing something or were those benchmarks really as brutal as they looked? It was beaten by a Core i3 and lower end first gen Ryzen chips.

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It's a lower-end part, but regardless, POWER9 isn't really anything special in terms of instruction throughput / calculations (it's only got 4-wide SIMD for example), and its FP performance is not great.

Where it really shines compared to x86/64 is memory bandwidth / throughput.

IBM advertise their "big iron" systems in Transactions Per Second. A measure of the total system performance; IPC, Buses, caches, etc. They get shit stomped in a traditional CPU bound benchmark. Remember Apples marketing using "The Megahertz Myth" in their later PPC days because of how one sided benchmarks (and clock speeds) were getting?

It's a fine arch with plenty to offer but a 1:1 comparison with an x86 desktop is like saying that a 50 ton bulldozer just got wrecked in a race with a Bugatti Veron.

The bulldozer would even lose from a Fiat 500 or a bicycle if it came to raw speed.

"For those curious about the performance potential for low-end POWER9 parts compared to the more common high-core/thread count POWER processors we have benchmarked before..."

They are benchmarking a low end 4 core part that sells for $375. They have 24 core Power9 chips. I believe, though, that they all lag current Intel and AMD parts. Their market is mostly mainframes and high-reliability specialty servers.

I thought that they were wonderful few years ago, compared to those 4 core CPUs. Now, that we will have 64 core ThreadRipper soon for quite reasonable price, that's a very different landscape. AMD really is changing the world. What a time to be alive.

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