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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Interesting development, let's hope that IBM will pick this up and run with it as an officially supported OS at some point. It would give lots more room upwards for when you're about to max out a single server x86 set-up.

It won't be long before someone runs a top-of-the-line X86 to Power8 benchmark using FreeBSD.

Here is such a comparison using linux:

http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh092914-story02.html

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>It won't be long before someone runs a top-of-the-line X86 to Power8 benchmark using FreeBSD.

>Here is such a comparison using linux:

>http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh092914-story02.html

Which benchmarks are linux-to-linux? In the article, it says the SAP SD test is AIX vs Windows, and the SPECjEnterprise test is AIX vs Oracle Linux; and in the linked Oracle benchmarks, it seems to always be IBM/AIX vs Sparc/Linux.

.. you could just ask us freebsd developers which benchmarks you'd like us to run on the box we have. :)

-adrian

Eh. IBM chip is faster at IBM selected benchmarks? Shocker. Also no mention of price.

Not terrible price:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/s812l-s822l/bro...

Comparable to shonky-ass x64 HP kit.

Perhaps I'm crazy but I'd love to see Windows Server on this as well. A non-x86 based platform alternative would be a refreshing change in that area.

It does illustrate a point, though. I would guess Intel is faster overall, but for the right applications POWER and SPARC can be faster.

Namely, most applications that benefit from parallelism will benefit from POWER or SPARC, since both platforms pack a high number of cores and a high number of concurrent threads per core.

This doesn't sound like much for consumer devices (PowerPC was the gold standard for gaming consoles last generation, but now Nintendo's the only one still using POWER in any significant application), but with Erlang/Elixir and Scala (among other languages renowned for facilitating "easy" parallelism) being the latest hot shit right now, these advantages are going to be much more significant.

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