Intel CPU's seem to dominate LINPACK and Spec benchmarks

In SpecINT and SpecFP Intel clearly dominates. It also has the top spot in Rmax (tested, verifiable GFlops) for Processor Generation, June 2015. The most powerful HPC cluster according to LINPACK is also an Intel-based cluster (out of the PRC). There is one supercomputer in the top three (and 4 in the top 10) that uses the 45nm Power architecture, but there's nothing on what Power generation CPU is being used.

I've read that x86 in general doesn't do too well on the benchmark metrics used to measure performance in the Enterprise DB world. Is this true? What are the go-to CPU's in the Enterprise DB world? Sparc64?

Strangely enough, the 2nd most powerful HPC cluster in the world, according to the LINPACK benchmark is an Opteron 6274 based cluster, but that's probably because the Opterons aren't being directly used to run the LINPACK benchmark, but the Nvidia K20x's installed in the chassis are:

http://www.top500.org/lists/2015/06/

This is a tough one, I'm not well versed in CPUs outside of AMD, Intel, ARM, and IBM. HPC is a whole other animal.

Intel, AMD, and Power have ruled the HPC world for a while now, but I believe thats due to their fast buses and their ability to scale with each added socket. Power works very well in this world because IBM designed the CPU to scale up to 31 sockets with the same bus.

I can investigate more into this but the people over at www.realworldtech.com would know more. Their forum is pretty basic but the folks over there are more versed in all CPUs. I have focused on the popular x86 CPUs in my studies.

Dolk said:

This is a tough one, I'm not well versed in CPUs outside of AMD, Intel, ARM, and IBM. HPC is a whole other animal.

Intel, AMD, and Power have ruled the HPC world for a while now, but I believe thats due to their fast buses and their ability to scale with each added socket. Power works very well in this world because IBM designed the CPU to scale up to 31 sockets with the same bus.

I can investigate more into this but the people over at www.realworldtech.com would know more. Their forum is pretty basic but the folks over there are more versed in all CPUs. I have focused on the popular x86 CPUs in my studies.

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AMD CPU's weren't even considered for the two new clusters built at the place I'm working. As is discussed in another thread and borne out by SpecINT and SpecFP benchmarks and others AMD CPU's aren't competitive w/Intel in the high performance arena.

I agree. I would have said back in the post-Barcelona days that AMD was decent with Intel in the high performance arena. They scaled better when you did socket to socket. But Intel is the king in all departments.

Well except for APU systems.