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by walki 3185 days ago
> How does, e.g., POWER8 compare? (And POWER9, soon?)

POWER8 is not well suited for HPC workloads as their vector instructions (VMX/AltiVec) are only 128-bit wide vs Intel's latest Skylake Xeon CPUs have vector instructions (AVX512) that are 512-bit wide.

For non HPC workloads (e.g. integer arithmetic) the POWER8 CPUs were somehow competitive with Intel's CPUs when they were first released in 2015 but today AMD and Intel's CPUs are clearly faster.

From what I can tell CPU enthusiasts were not impressed by the POWER8 CPU architecture.