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

With the GNU Octave software as a MATLAB performance, the Talos II squeezed in front of the Threadripper systems for this single-core test.

One of the areas that POWER9 still has room to optimize is for Python, as shown by these PyBench results.

PHPBench for measuring the PHP language performance was in a similar situation of being well behind the x86_64 platforms.

This was certainly an interesting roundabout with this POWER9 Sforza-based Talos II for our initial benchmarking of it within our labs. This 44-core configuration is intended to compete with the likes of AMD Threadripper and Intel Core i9 families and it did manage to successfully do so in a majority of the benchmarks come out ahead of the Threadripper 2990WX and Core i9 7980XE. In many of the demanding CPU/system tests, the POWER9 system showed its true power while in areas like PHP and Python show that IBM POWER can still benefit from more software optimizations.

The Talos II also successfully competed with these high-end x86_64 workstation/HEDT processors in the performance-per-Watt department even with the Talos II having a SAS controller, BMC, and other components factored into the overall AC system power consumption.

While it competed with the Intel/AMD competition in raw performance and energy efficiency, where the configuration is much less competitive is in price. The Talos II motherboard costs more than the Threadripper 2990WX while the 22-core CPUs each cost over $2600 USD retail. But with the Talos II and POWER9 is the possibility of having a fully open-source and verifiable system down to the system and BMC firmware, the CPU firmware, and other sources are all publicly available that sadly can't be said for Intel due to their ME and other proprietary bits and likewise with AMD due to their PSP and no longer supporting Coreboot. Talos II is the most open-source friendly, high-performance system currently available. Talos II is also manufactured in the United States.

With the price of the Talos II being too much for most individuals, Raptor Computing Systems should have more information to share soon on their Blackbird POWER9 system. When that information becomes available, we'll certainly pass it along. More details on their current offerings via RaptorCS.com. For those interested in cloud/VPS access to POWER9 for software testing or other development purposes without the upfront cost of a POWER9 system, Raptor does offer access via IntegriCloud.

More Raptor Talos II system benchmarks will be coming soon on Phoronix. There will also be continued benchmarks as more POWER9 Linux software optimizations are achieved along with testing the Talos II on various Linux distributions and other benchmarks. Post in the forums or Twitter with any other test requests.

Want to see how your own Linux system(s) compare to the hardware tested? Simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1811068-SK-TALOS205952.