It depends on what kinds of instructions you count. I strongly suspect that your 3GIps number is only register-to-register integer arithmetic, while the 110GIps is some IBM-ish "mixed workload" that uses most of the System/z instruction set. (which includes things like "get CRC32 of this buffer" as one instruction)
Average of Dhrystone and Whetstone, which is not a proper benchmark indeed.
Those special instructions such as CRC32 or SHA256 are rarely needed in scientific simulations such as Monte Carlo simulations or real-time working with Bayesian Network, what this system is aimed for. In these scenarios raw power and big on-board caches what matter and on paper the POWER8 has these, but 110 GIPS is not the best bang for bucks.
System z is completely different thing from what is currently called Power Systems. Target market for System z is pretty much limited to OLTP and most of the weirdness of the platform comes from the fact that it is heavily optimized for exactly that and not for raw speed in two's-complement or FP arithmetics.
That's a standard consumer chips though. The Xeon server line can, with the E7-8895 v2 do 15 cores per CPU and you can have 8 of them for a total of 240 hyperthreaded cores. I don't know what could take advantage of that and what the tradeoffs for scheduling etc. would be but Sun will sell you one: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/x8... -- 6TB of RAM.
True, but that is rather motherboard-design and core-stacking question. x86 CPUs are made for consumer use-cases, but that doesn't mean it can't be stacked almost linearly, like the Knights Landing CPUs.
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110 GIPS is not too much for 141 CPU. My Core i7 4700HQ CPU dos 3 GIPS/core at 2.9 GHz.
It depends on what kinds of instructions you count. I strongly suspect that your 3GIps number is only register-to-register integer arithmetic, while the 110GIps is some IBM-ish "mixed workload" that uses most of the System/z instruction set. (which includes things like "get CRC32 of this buffer" as one instruction)
Average of Dhrystone and Whetstone, which is not a proper benchmark indeed.
Those special instructions such as CRC32 or SHA256 are rarely needed in scientific simulations such as Monte Carlo simulations or real-time working with Bayesian Network, what this system is aimed for. In these scenarios raw power and big on-board caches what matter and on paper the POWER8 has these, but 110 GIPS is not the best bang for bucks.
System z is completely different thing from what is currently called Power Systems. Target market for System z is pretty much limited to OLTP and most of the weirdness of the platform comes from the fact that it is heavily optimized for exactly that and not for raw speed in two's-complement or FP arithmetics.
yes but buying 3 of them gets you 3 machines that can do 3GIPS, not one machine that can do 9GIPS
That's a standard consumer chips though. The Xeon server line can, with the E7-8895 v2 do 15 cores per CPU and you can have 8 of them for a total of 240 hyperthreaded cores. I don't know what could take advantage of that and what the tradeoffs for scheduling etc. would be but Sun will sell you one: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/x8... -- 6TB of RAM.
True, but that is rather motherboard-design and core-stacking question. x86 CPUs are made for consumer use-cases, but that doesn't mean it can't be stacked almost linearly, like the Knights Landing CPUs.