A 3.3x Performance Improvement For FLAC Audio Encoding On POWER 64-bit

In last month's round of IBM POWER9 benchmarking on the Talos II systems compared to various Intel/AMD x86_64 CPUs, one of the areas where POWER was struggling especially was with multimedia encoding performance. Fortunately, since those POWER9 Phoronix benchmarks this year, various developers have been working on optimizations.

I recently wrote about an effort to improve VP9/AV1 video performance on POWER9 and now another push forward is with the FLAC audio encoding performance.

We're working on fixing the gaps identified in the recent @RaptorCompSys @phoronix POWER9 benchmarking comparison. A taste of what is to come, 3.3x on FLAC: https://t.co/0ceXDzfLjr

— Anton Blanchard (@antonblanchard) July 20, 2018

That's great to hear as our tests have shown FLAC audio encoding on the POWER9 hardware to be much slower than Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC capabilities:

A 3x performance improvement would certainly make the FLAC performance on these IBM POWER processors more comparable with the AMD/Intel wares.

The initial 7 patches providing this performance boost are providing vector support for PowerPC64.

I don't have my hands on any POWER hardware currently for testing to validate the improvement, but still am told IBM is working on procuring the hardware for future benchmarks on Phoronix.