13-Way IBM POWER9 Talos II vs. Intel Xeon vs. AMD Linux Benchmarks On Debian

First up were some OpenMP benchmarks.

With the Lattice-Boltzmann Method Fluid Dynamics test case, the dual 4-core POWER9 system came out ahead of the eight core Xeon Silver 4108. Granted, keep in mind the Xeon Silver 4108 has eight cores / sixteen threads while the eight POWER9 cores yield 32 threads. The POWER9 CPUs were topping out with a 4.2GHz clock speed. The dual 18-core POWER9 configuration was competing with the EPYC CPUs in this round of OpenMP benchmarking.

Similar to our first POWER9 benchmarking session back in April, the x264 performance and more broadly the multimedia CPU performance on POWER9 still could be much better optimized. The POWER9 performance was quite low compared to the x86_64 competition.

The 7-Zip compression performance was doing very well on the POWER9 hardware with the dual 4-core entry-level Talos II system coming ahead of the Xeon E5 Haswell CPUs and just behind the AMD EPYC 7351P. The 22-core Talos II Lite was outperforming the 32 core EPYC 7601 processor and the dual 18-core Talos II system was outperforming the dual Xeon Gold 6138 Tyan server.

The Stockfish chess benchmark was also running very well on POWER9 where the 22-core Talos II Lite was just behind the EPYC 7601, the dual quad-core POWER9 system well ahead of the other quad and octa core Intel Xeons, and the dual 18-core box outperforming the Xeon Gold 6138 by a small margin.