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

With the 4-core POWER9 CPU featuring 4-way SMT to provide 16 threads, it does perform well in highly-threaded workloads like XZ compression. In this case, the POWER9 CPU performed around the lines of a Core i5 8400/9400.

Or in the case of Zstd compression, the quad-core POWER9 processor performed closer to the Core i7 8700K.

GIMP still looks like it could benefit from some POWER9 improvements in general.

While Stockfish is a highly-threaded chess program, the POWER9 performance of the quad-core part only came in line with the Ryzen 3 2200G.