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

The LLVM compilation speed was comparable in this case to the Ryzen 5 2400G.

In other applications like LAME MP3 that are single-threaded we see the x86_64 CPUs performing better at least until seeing more IBM POWER9 support/optimizations in upstream programs.

Dav1d is another workload that could benefit from POWER9 tuning.

So at worst in software packages not being tuned for POWER, there were cases of the 4-core POWER9 processor falling behind the quad-core x86_64 parts like the Ryzen 3. In workloads that had been tested/tuned for POWER, the 4-core POWER9 processor was competitive with the Intel/AMD processors of similar core counts. Of course, the IBM POWER9 4-core at $375 USD is at a premium over the Intel/AMD processors of similar specs, but that is a cost to be had for processors manufactured in New York and open-source that to the extent when paired with the Raptor Blackbird or Talos II can allow a fully libre/open-source system down to the firmware. Additional Blackbird Linux benchmarks will be coming in soon.