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

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

    Phoronix: 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...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Finally I can buy that Power9 system as my dedicated FLAC encoder!

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    • #3
      Hey, how about that?
      13-Way IBM POWER9 Talos II vs. Intel Xeon vs. AMD Linux Benchmarks On Debian

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      • #4
        but still am told IBM is working on procuring the hardware for future benchmarks on Phoronix.
        Fancy. I hope you manage to get your hands on one of those Talos workstations motherboards and their respective CPUs.

        If IBM want this architecture to take off, they need to let more people get their hands on those things. Holding them back will not magically increase software performance, and sales people will love to get charts showing their stuff is competitive with AMD and Intel.

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        • #5
          Glad to see someone working on optimizing for POWER systems...
          I mean, look, a POWER9 CPU can have up to 22 cores, and you can get dual-CPU ones with up to 44 cores. With that many cores, and the raw performance of each core, it should blow everything else out of the water.

          Lastly, and probably off-topic, but I wonder if these optimizations would work on POWER4-based CPU's, like the PowerMac G5?

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          • #6
            This change in FLAC still won't make it threaded, so it's still a poor test for such a box--unless you use it as a throughput test rather than a latency test.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by mzs.112000 View Post
              Glad to see someone working on optimizing for POWER systems...
              I mean, look, a POWER9 CPU can have up to 22 cores, and you can get dual-CPU ones with up to 44 cores. With that many cores, and the raw performance of each core, it should blow everything else out of the water.

              Lastly, and probably off-topic, but I wonder if these optimizations would work on POWER4-based CPU's, like the PowerMac G5?
              Not likely. VSX-3 are Altivec SIMD instructions for PowerISA 3 or later.

              VSX (Vector Scalar Extension)[edit]

              Power ISA v2.06 introduces the new VSX vector-scalar instructions[5] which extend SIMD processing for the Power ISA to support up to 64 registers, with support for regular floating point, decimal floating point and vector execution. POWER7 is the first Power Architecture processor to implement Power ISA v2.06.

              New instructions are introduced by IBM under the Vector Media Extension category for integer operations as part of the VSX extension in Power ISA 2.07.

              New integer vector instructions were introduced by IBM following the VMX encodings as part of the VSX extension in Power ISA v3.0. Shall be introduced with POWER9 processors.[6]

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              • #8
                Originally posted by M@GOid View Post

                Fancy. I hope you manage to get your hands on one of those Talos workstations motherboards and their respective CPUs.

                If IBM want this architecture to take off, they need to let more people get their hands on those things. Holding them back will not magically increase software performance, and sales people will love to get charts showing their stuff is competitive with AMD and Intel.
                Timothy Pearson from Raptor here. We're working hard with IBM to do exactly this, and in fact we offer free POWER9 VPS boxes to developers that want to port their applications to POWER or improve performance, etc. We have also considered offering Michael an evaluation box free of charge, but are waiting to see what IBM will do first.

                Just wanted to say that this is something we are acutely aware of and working to improve, as well as expanding the lineup of POWER9 boxes on the low end. At this point we have a couple of different offerings below $2,000 USD, and plans to add more as time goes on.

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                • #9
                  Interesting... Wonder what type of setup someone would be running as a server for flac encoding considering IBM's Power products. Never really gave flac encoding a second thought, doing 1GB+ Ardour session exports to flac.. Not really much of a thing for a desktop user. Of course more performance flexibility is good for any given system.
                  Last edited by creative; 20 July 2018, 07:56 PM.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by madscientist159 View Post
                    Timothy Pearson from Raptor here. We're working hard with IBM to do exactly this, and in fact we offer free POWER9 VPS boxes to developers that want to port their applications to POWER or improve performance, etc.
                    Where can I get more information about that? One of my projects, SIMDe, could make it easier for people to port their code to POWER, I think access to a POWER9 VPS could be mutually beneficial…

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