IBM POWER8 performance features and evaluation

Abstract

The IBM POWER8™ processor was designed for high performance on traditional server workloads as well as big data, analytics, and cloud workloads. In this paper, we describe key performance features of the IBM POWER8 processor. These include hardware assists that allow the POWER8 processor to automatically adapt to changing workloads by dynamically monitoring and tuning itself, enhancements to hardware instrumentation for performance monitoring, and performance improvements for encryption, virtualization, and I/O. We also describe the performance characteristics of a wide variety of applications, and we present the results of these applications running on POWER8 processor-based systems compared with previous generations of IBM Power Systems™.