[CM] IBM's Power 8 chip

[RS Wood]

From the «you know it's powerful cuz the name» department:
Title: Assessing IBM's POWER8
Author: Thom Holwerda
Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 19:02:28 -0400
Link: http://osnews.com/story/29312/Assessing_IBM_s_POWER8

It is the widest superscalar processor on the market, one that can issue up to
10 instructions and sustain 8 per clock: IBM's POWER8. IBM's POWER CPUs have
always captured the imagination of the hardware enthusiast; it is the
Tyrannosaurus Rex, the M1 Abrams of the processor world. Still, despite a flood
of benchmarks and reports, it is very hard to pinpoint how it compares to the
best Intel CPUs in performance wise. We admit that our own first attempt did
not fully demystify the POWER8 either, due to the fact that some immature LE
Linux software components (OpenJDK, MySQL...) did not allow us to run our
enterprise workloads. Hence we're undertaking another attempt to understand
what the strengths and weaknesses are of Intel's most potent challenger. And we
have good reasons besides curiosity and geekiness: IBM has just recently
launched the IBM S812LC, the most affordable IBM POWER based server ever. IBM
advertises the S812LC with "Starting at $4,820". That is pretty amazing if you
consider that this is not some basic 1U server, but a high expandable 2U server
with 32 (!) DIMM slots, 14 disk bays, 4 PCIe Gen 3 slots, and 2 redundant power
supplies. Classic AnandTech. This is only part 1 - more parts are to follow.


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