IBM Power10 Shreds Ice Lake Xeons for Transaction Processing

nextplatform.com

21 pointsrbanffy4 comments

I'd like to start out with a "well duh". Specialised hardware is going to be better than lesser-specialised hardware. A transation-ASIC will probably shred the Power10.

POWER is specialised for record-based operations, and is specialised for traditional mainframe workloads. Granted, most of those specialisms are best used in a mainframe context, but even all stand-alone cores in a workstation they still retain most of that benefit, purely based on instructions it supports.

IBM mainframes are not POWER based. Different architectures.

It's true that the System/* all the way up to z/Architecture aren't POWER-based, hence the adjacency ("mainframe workloads", "mainframe context") but not mainframes outright.

> IBM’s Power family of processors and their resulting hardware systems has never been particularly focused on price/performance or performance per watt,

Unfortunately that's the only mention of "watt" in the article. One core outperforming another is not so interesting when it takes way more power...

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