Over at the Smarter Computing Blog, IBM’s Sumit Gupta writes that newly published STAC-A2 benchmarks show POWER8-based servers can deliver more than twice the performance of the best x86 server when running standard financial industry workloads.
STAC-A2 gives a much more accurate view of the expected performance as compared to micro benchmarks or simple code loops. STAC recently performed STAC-A2 Benchmark tests on a stack consisting of the STAC-A2 Pack for Linux on an IBM Power System S824 server using two IBM POWER8 Processor cards at 3.52 GHz and 1TB of DRAM, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 7. And, as reported above, according to audited STAC results, the IBM Power System S824 delivered more than twice the performance of the best x86 based server measured. Those are the kind of results that matter—real results for real client challenges.