Quote:
Originally Posted by
Alienware69
calling BS on that sorry lol. More powerful than AMD maybe but not Intel.
http://www.anandtech.com/print/4285
btw, that benchmark was dated on the IBM side (and done on a 750 which uses a slower processor). My understanding is that the real numbers for that benchmark favor POWER7 by 25+%. In addition, POWER7 doesn't suffer from scaling issues like Xeon when you begin looking at systems with many more sockets. Also noteworthy that the POWER7 design is a much larger process and the design is a couple of years older.
A couple other interesting sources of performance data (benches of POWER compared to Intel are hard to find though the number of people in the industry who recognize that POWER7 is faster are not in similarly short supply)
http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2012/03/performance-and-scalability-on-ibm.html
http://eprints.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/637/1/PMBS.pdf (warning: pdf -- is a whitepaper comparing several server chips, only accounts for westmere and prior. Note also that it not only won in performance, but also in performance per watt)
Here's some specs on the original POWER7
567mm2 @ 45nm lithography
Transistors: 1.2 B
clockspeed: 4.2GHz
Eight processor cores
12 execution units per core -- 2 Fixed point, 2 Load/store, 4 DP floating point, 1 Vector, 1 Branch, 1 Condition Register , 1 Decimal
6-wide in-order dispatch
8-wide out-of-order issue
4 Way SMT per core
32 Threads per chip
256 KB L2 per core 32MB on chip eDRAM shared L3
Dual DDR3 Memory Controllers with 100 GB/s Memory bandwidth per chip
Scalability up to 32 Sockets
360 GB/s SMP bandwidth/chip
20,000 coherent operations in flight
Advanced pre-fetching Data and Instruction
energy-star rated
I don't have any SPARC benchmarks, but the new chips are even faster than the POWER7. It's telling that 25% of the fastest 100 supercomputers run POWER. Intel has to make the same design work for consumers
and HPC while IBM only targets one market (and then there's the fact that IBM doesn't have old x86 baggage to deal with).
edit:
@crust_cheese
that's kind of true, but it's a little strange. I've read IBM's docs some and PowerPC isn't a strict subset. Sometimes the same instruction does slightly different things or they use different instructions to do the same thing.
@cdoublejj
IBM, Motorola, and Apple were the first companies to get together in the POWER consortium and worked jointly to create PowerPC as a more consumer-oriented (read: stripped down) POWER ISA. Motorola was supposed to make the G5 chip design for Apple. When they finished, the processor was blazing fast, but has a physical bug and the workaround blew the performance (like how the original Phenoms slowed way down when the TLB workaround was used). IBM's version of the G5 wasn't tuned for what Apple needed and Apple (probably Steve Jobs) thought IBM should be the company to pay for the R&D to which IBM said no as they wouldn't recover their money.