WolfpackN64 said:
Depends, the POWER8 chips stomp all over the intel Xeons. |
Totally right, although having 96 Treads running at once (12 physical processors 8-multithreading, unlike Intel which does only 2-way multitreading) is the main reason for this. It's IPC (Instructions per Clock) is a bit worse compared to Haswells architecture and it's performance per Watt is even worse by leaps and bounds unless running tailor-made applications.
IBM POWER nowadays is soely developed for high power computing, what makes them strong there is often more a handicap when it would be applied to another use, like consoles. Which is why I thought from the beginning that the Wii U's follow-up would have a totaly different CPU. And since ARM is still too weak (especially when it comes to floating point operations where they get trounced by x86 designs of the same TDP) and carries the Stigma of being a smartphone chip, x86 is the only logical choice for the next generation of consoles (unless for a streaming console, where ARM would suffice).
Also, POWER8 is a bit of a behemoth as it's a freaking huge chip (bigger than almost all gpus in fact), which makes cooling the chip rather difficult outside of a server.
Mind you, IBM POWER could still be used in a console, but the chip would need to be so heavily customized it would barely even resemble anyting from what it spun off. Probably not worth the risk, even more so as you can't know what the chip would bring in the end after stripping away anything a console wouldn't need or couldn't use, as there wouldn't be much left.
