POWER9 & ARM Performance Against Intel Xeon Cascadelake + AMD EPYC Rome

While just a synthetic kernel benchmark, Hackbench that stresses the kernel scheduler saw the POWER9 server beat out the Intel Cascadelake server.

Hopefully this cursory comparison proved of some use for those wondering how the current ARM and POWER performance can stack up against the newest Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors.

The Talos II server with dual IBM POWER9 22-core servers ended up delivering performance around that of the EPYC 7551 previous-generation Naples processor. But overall the Talos II POWER9 had quite a respectable showing compared to the x86_64 CPUs. While not at the same performance level as Intel Cascadelake or AMD Rome, the benefit of the POWER9 route is the open ecosystem around the processor and for the entire system from the likes of Raptor Computing Systems where they provide schematics and open-source code down to the BIOS/microcode. As for the ARM performance, the Ampere eMAG came out ahead of the Cavium ThunderX for this range of single and multi-threaded benchmarks as while it has less cores than Cavium, it does offer much higher clock speeds. There's also the matter of the software support as it stands today with x86_64 certainly at the advantage with more software packages being tuned for it. However, there is increasing exposure to ARM and POWER by open-source developers that may yield more untapped potential moving forward. So that's where things stand today with regards to the latest Intel/AMD CPUs against IBM POWER9 and ARM for currently-released products and the current Linux software stack - we'll certainly repeat these tests in the months ahead.