Raptor Talos II POWER9 Benchmarks Against AMD Threadripper & Intel Core i9

First up was the Rodinia OpenMP benchmark where the Talos II with dual 22-core processors (44 cores / 176 threads) had the performance aligned with the Core i9 7980XE, which in turn were behind the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2 WX series performance.

Under the highly-threaded 7-Zip compression benchmark, this 176 thread workstation/server did come out well beyond the performance of the Core i9 7980XE and Threadripper 2 series. This Talos II configuration was 70% faster than the Core i9 7980XE, granted much more costly with the 7980XE retailing for under $2000 USD while the 22-core POWER9 CPUs cost around $2625 each.

The Talos II did consume more power than the Intel/AMD HEDT systems. Keep in mind though there are differences we couldn't isolated like the Talos II having a SAS controller reportedly pulling around 22 Watts among other hardware differences. This 176 thread system was having about a 400 Watt average power draw with 7-Zip and a peak of over 500 Watts.

But on a performance-per-Watt basis, the Talos II with dual POWER9 CPUs actually comes in line with the latest Intel/AMD processors.

The Stockfish chess engine offered small performance benefits over the Threadripper 2990WX while it remained competitive on a performance-per-Watt front. Being able to conduct these AC system power consumption tests in our environment is one of the benefits of now having the Talos II hardware locally for comparison.