anon2 (anon.delete@this.anon.com) on September 6, 2021 3:36 pm wrote:
> Result here
>
> Not a bad result compared with the recent quite equivalent HPE Superdome
>
> About 50% faster per socket, but about 50% slower per thread (and 2x the number of threads).
> I think POWER has always done quite well on this benchmark for some reason (maybe it likes thread
> level parallelism?) so it remains to be seen how this translates to other performance.
>
> The POWER10 is nearly as fast as a POWER9 with 2x more sockets though, so comparing POWER vs POWER
> there is still significant gain. Thread strength up about 50% and threads per socket up about 50%.

Technically, I feel you are underselling Power10 quite a bit. 1.42x socket throughput is married by 2.66x core performance. With that kind of gap, I expect the Power10 system should be comfortably ahead still when set to SMT4 or SMT2 even (with lower throughput advantage), should it come to a competitive stand-off with x86 systems. Which is probably not really the key selling point. No amount of technical superiority has been able to reverse the erosion of Power systems sales, so it stands to reason to assume per thread performance, particularly when improved generation over generation, will not be an issue.

More enlightened folks will be able to analyse the performance characteristics better, but what I understand is that IBM has always equipped Power systems with much higher memory, interconnect and IO bandwidth than comparable x86 systems (and designed the cores/uncore with those assumption) because the high ASP of Power systems can absorb the added manufacturing costs, and the targeted applications benefit greatly.