POWER9 Blackbird Performance On Ubuntu 19.04 vs. Ubuntu 19.10 Benchmarks

We have done a lot of benchmarks on Intel/AMD x86_64 for Ubuntu 19.10 for seeing how its performance is looking, but what about IBM POWER9 with the likes of the libre Raptor Blackbird? Here are some Ubuntu 19.04 vs. 19.10 POWER benchmarks I recently carried out.

Using the great Blackbird POWER9 system from Raptor Computing Systems, I compared the performance of clean / out-of-the-box installs of Ubuntu 19.04 and Ubuntu 19.10.

Here are those highlights:

For many I/O benchmarks, Ubuntu 19.04 is faster than the newer 19.10. Or rather, likely a kernel regression affecting at least IBM POWER between Linux 5.0 and 5.3. The storage backing the Blackbird was an NVMe SSD without any kernel I/O scheduler. I/O is the main area where Ubuntu 19.04 was faster along with a few other random tests. Meanwhile for workloads like audio/video encoding, image manipulation, PHP, Python, Redis, and other real-world workloads were up to a few percent gains using the new Ubuntu 19.10.

Those wishing to go through all the Ubuntu 19.04 vs. 19.10 tests in full from the Blackbird POWER9 system can do so via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file for 124 different test cases. Learn more about this POWER9 micro-ATX developer/desktop board at RaptorCS.com.