Raptor Talos II POWER9 Benchmarks Against AMD Threadripper & Intel Core i9

[madscientist159]

I would be curious to see something like QEMU user mode tests to see how well this system can run x86 binaries.

My recommendation is HQEMU -- it has POWER support, and is fast compared to QEMU TCG. Even though system mode is a little buggy, it worked enough to boot an XP disk and the difference was stark -- "unusably slow" (normal QEMU TCG) vs. "this PC just feels a little underpowered for XP" (HQEMU). User mode is supposed to work significantly better, but I haven't had a chance to try it out yet.

http://itanium.iis.sinica.edu.tw/hqemu/

[WolfpackN64]

I would be curious to see something like QEMU user mode tests to see how well this system can run x86 binaries.

[Adarion]

It is a very impressive machine, indeed. Still, unaffordable for me at the time. Something like this in small (less sockets, cores/threads, RAM,...) would probably gain a good amount of interest.

[Weasel]

Lol, what x86 dominance in super computers? Only 4 of the top 10 largest supercomputers in the world are x86. The x86 supercomputer fad died in the last decade.

The top supercomputers nowadays are all based on POWER, weird Chinese chips, or Xeon Phi cards.

And nobody gives a shit about supercomputers.

[torsionbar28]

Wow.....
Will this threaten the x86 dominance on the desktop maybe?
Will this threaten the x86 dominance in the super computers?
maybe... Would be nice with some competition.

Lol, what x86 dominance in super computers? Only 4 of the top 10 largest supercomputers in the world are x86. The x86 supercomputer fad died in the last decade.

The top supercomputers nowadays are all based on POWER, weird Chinese chips, or Xeon Phi cards.

[torsionbar28]

Nice results, but until more applications get a proper upstream port to POWER that does not require making extensive patches to the code it's not even up for consideration as a desktop or workstation.

Upstream Chromium sources are still unbuildable on POWER. Ditto upstream Libreoffice and Firefox. And a bunch of other applications I use on a regular basis.

This was the case for a while, even for x86_64, when that was the new thing. It'll come.

[ruthan]

Could it run Crysis through Qemu or Wine?

[anemusek]

Besides being fully open-source, the Talos II is also manufactured in the US with the IBM POWER9 processors being fabbed in New York while the Raptor motherboard is manufactured in Texas along with where their systems are assembled.

For 95% people on the world there is disadvantage.

[darkbasic]

Long term it would be great if AMD would provide open firmware for their GPUs and compute cards, so that either it could be flashed to the GPU itself or shipped as part of the base firmware image, but AMD has publicly stated they cannot do so at this time.

Everybody would love that. Hopefully Intel's discrete GPUs won't require proprietary firmware, but I wouldn't bet on it.

[rene]

It's a dual CPU board running 2 CPUs.

I know, it was internally written a little bit funny to make your day, and I would actually be interested in a new, higher performance PPC64 hardware ;-) https://t2sde.org/hardware/desktop/A...tion/Apple/G5/