Benchmarking A 10-Core Tyan/IBM POWER Server For ~$300 USD

The more efficient fans make a huge dent, almost 200 W when comparing the peaks. The average is certainly lower for the quiet fan case due to throttling, but the peak value should be comparable for both.

For our European readers, at the time of writing there's still more than 10 units left, at 269 euros a piece. They only ship to Europe, and my unit came in under a week. It's quite a cheap way to get started with POWER, especially considering the 8-core cpu's list price was 1240$. Its open source status is not as good as that of Raptor products though. For example, the BMC and PNOR (Petitboot etc.) firmwares can be flashed, but the sources for the originals are not available as far as I know. However, Linux-side, there are no firmware blobs required at all. The Mellanox ten gigabit ethernet card doesn't require any, nor do the Marvell SATA controller or the TI USB controller. The AST BMC VGA output likewise requires no blobs. It might certainly be called free-er than many x86 systems.The cooling is certainly a downside at this time. Either you put up with the thunderous default fans, or jerry-rig up a custom solution, perhaps with throttling. Here's hoping for some cooler competition in this space. The Habanero is a nice board, with all the usual server niceties, and these refurb machines are certainly attractive to folks looking to try some POWER.

Thanks to Lauri for this guest post. All of the benchmark details can be found via OpenBenchmarking.org. If you want to see how your own system(s) performance compares, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1903179-SP-1811068SK37.