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

When it came to code compilation performance, the Talos II systems were performing well with their GCC compilation speed of compiling the LLVM compiler stack in this instance with multiple jobs.

With the Primesieve prime number benchmark the dual quad-core Talos II system was performing strong while the two higher-end POWER9 systems were leaving more performance to be desired in relation to the EPYC and Xeon Gold performance.

POWER9 was performing extremely well in the Zstd compression benchmark. The Xeon systems were outperforming the EPYC hardware in the Zstd benchmark while the POWER9 hardware managed to beat out the Intel x86_64 CPUs in this single-thread test case.

For for audio encoding with FLAC and MP3 is another one of the areas where the POWER9 CPU performance is behind, but could possibly be improved with maturing POWER9 compiler support.