A Look At The Open-Source Talos II POWER9 Performance Against x86_64 Server CPUs

So while these dual 22-core POWER9 Sforza CPUs are intended more for workstations than going up against Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC servers, that's the look at how the performance is looking from the Talos II when pitted up against the recent x86_64 server hardware available for benchmarking. It will certainly be interesting to revisit these benchmarks in months or a half-year down the road to test the ongoing optimization work in this space, especially with more Linux users/developers picking up POWER9 in the form of Talos II or Talos II Lite or the newly-announced and lower-cost Raptor Blackbird for driving developer-friendly POWER open-source hardware to the marketplace.

Even still, if you want a system that is as open-source as possible down to the hardware, there isn't any superior solution at this stage for a liberated hardware platform besides Raptor Computing's products. Other hardware platforms that are open-source down to the system BIOS are generally lower-end and for several generations old platforms that were freed after the fact rather than being designed around open-source. Yes, there is RISC-V progressing and some "open" designs but at this stage the current SoCs are far from high performance. Raptor's products are also designed and manufactured in the US.

Thanks to Raptor Computing Systems for the Talos II now used for our POWER9 Linux benchmarking and those wanting to learn more about the new Blackbird motherboard can see the news from last week with all the details.