An Initial Look At The IBM POWER9 4-Core / 16-Thread CPU Performance On The Blackbird

[phoronix]

Phoronix: An Initial Look At The IBM POWER9 4-Core / 16-Thread CPU Performance On The Blackbird

A few weeks ago we received a POWER9 Raptor Blackbird for testing that features an IBM POWER9 4-core (16 thread) processor clocked at 3.80GHz. For those curious about the performance potential for low-end POWER9 parts compared to the more common high-core/thread count POWER processors we have benchmarked before like in the Talos II server, here are some initial tests of that petite POWER9 processor.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=28019

[Snaipersky]

Very interesting results, really highlights the disparity between assembly-tuned performance and generic paths.

[starshipeleven]

It's actually not that bad for tasks without assembler optimizations.

[andrei_me]

IDK if it's assembler optimizations or just not using the appropriate operation or at the appropriate sizes

[toxicdragon]

Very interesting test, thank you! phoronix is there a possibility that you test the 8-core POWER9 processor on the Blackbird aswell? Maybe RaptorComputingSystem sends you an 8-core processor for testing?

[microcode]

It'd be cool to compare V8 on POWER 9, after the work that's been done on that. Maybe also that Java global illumination renderer test you had too. Not sure how up to date the OpenJDK in whatever distro you're using.

[alexhaydock]

Very interesting graphs. Would be great to see this paired up with some performance-per-watt metrics to see what the power draw is like compared to the x86 systems being compared.

[poorguy]

In multiple benchmarks, I'm unable to tell if the test is single-threaded or multi-threaded, and if it is multi-threaded, how many threads there are.

Both views are different yet useful.

I'm especially interested in the case of `zstd`, since it can be used with either 1-thread (default), fixed N threads (-T#), or automatic nb of threads (-T0), which is useful to compare cpus with different architectural choices (few cores but superwide with a lot of hyperthreading, versus lots of core but less powerful ones).

[curaga]

Looks like the Lame and FLAC patches haven't yet landed. Dav1d has some work in git. Michael, OB's result page does not seem to like the slash: https://openbenchmarking.org/system/...OWER9%204c/16t

[tildearrow]

No, you can't play 4K AV1 videos yet on your Blackbird:

POWER9 4c/16t: 12.10fps
Ryzen 3 2200G: 42.46fps
Core i5 7600K: 50.83fps
Core i3 8100: 54.82fpa
Ryzen 5 2400G: 56.75fps
Core i5 9400F: 79.92fps
Core i5 8400: 81.81fps
Ryzen 7 2700: 93.15fps
Ryzen 7 2700X: 105.2fps
Core i7 8700K: 111.76fps
Core i9 9900K: 136.48fps