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fatslob-:O on 06 May 2014
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Pemalite said:
Captain_Tom said:

I wish IBM would just jump in and stomp Intel.  They currently have an 8-core cpu and through hyperthreading each core can read 12 lines of code each for a total of 96 threads!  Oh and it runs above 4 GHz...


Intel's cores are easily better than IBM's, remember, clockspeed became irrellevant years ago for comparing CPU performance.
If IBM truly did have a powerhouse of a CPU, then they would be controlling a much much much larger share of the lucrative server pie, which values absolute performance over power in many scenario's.

Also, Intel has 8 and 16 core Xeon's.

It's not all about having higher IPC's either ... Once you need ridiculously large vectors that demand AVX-1024 the IPC argument becomes totally worthless as most applications are simply don't have this structure to take advantange of the high amount of instruction level parallelism. 

http://abinstein.blogspot.ca/2010/09/ipc-myths.html

Despite the fact that abinstein has a clear bias for AMD he's absolutely right about this issue. (This abinstein is probably the same one from AMDZone.) 

The only way we could probably realistically increase single threaded performance in the future is that we would basically need to increase the clocks or get instruction set extensions dedicated to increasing single threaded performance. 

I'm not sure if you would consider this to be a powerhouse but here it goes ... Each Power8 core has 2 VMX units and likely 4 single precision floating point units which basically means that the processor at hand is capable of 12 Fused Multiply-Add instructions so each core can pull off 24 flops/cycle. With 12 cores all clocked at 5 Ghz would mean that it can do 1.44 Teraflops tops! No that is not small and I think this may have being the first commercial CPU to do that. (Aside from the xeon phi ofcourse.)

I would agree with you about IBM controlling alot more of the server market than it has now because of more power but the tools and everything else is so much better on the x86 side of things.