Intel Corp (INTC)

[chipguy]

This is interesting:

We found that the POWER8 needs more than one thread to deliver good performance: with one thread we only achieve 62% of the performance of a Haswell core at the same speed. Using the mcpu=power8 compiler flag did little more than boost the performance by 1-3%, which is within the margin of error of this benchmark. So your (occassional?) single threaded code will fare badly on POWER8.

Like I said recently, it appears that Intel and Apple are the only CPU
designers that give a shit about single thread performance any more.
The simple reason is it is really, really hard and requires a combination
of excellence in microarchitecture, circuit design, and physical design.
If you can't compete in execution speed then the only course left is
throughput and you can either throw cores (AMD and ARM) or a high
level of SMT threading (IBM and Oracle) at the problem.