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You might have issues with the quality of your compiler or you might be using POWER7 code and/or have VSX disabled. IME POWER8 is somewhat faster than high end Xeons (although not in terms of price/performance).

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I compiled my code using the latest GCC version available, I even made sure I used the right compiler flags to enable e.g. hardware POPCNT support. I know that IBM claimed that POWER8 CPUs were faster than Intel Xeon CPUs but I found the opposite to be true (at least for the benchmarks I cared about). You can also find many other benchmarks on the web which are in favor of Intel Xeon CPUs compared to POWER8.

I am not against IBM POWER CPUs, I was just disappointed by POWER8...

Fair enough. I'm sure it's workload dependent, and also I have not tested huge data sets. I'm most interested in the overhead of virtualization and (separately) compile times.

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