“Cranking up the heat in the computer server wars, IBM Corp. announced a new benchmark for its Power4-based systems that it claims puts it first in performance and price. The announcement came Monday (June 30) as Hewlett-Packard Co. launched a new line of servers based on a fresh version of the Itanium 2 processor it co-developed with Intel Corp.,” reports Rick Merritt for EE Times.
Merritt writes, “The back-to-back press announcements underscore the heated competition between IBM’s Power and Intel and HP’s Itanium processors in the multi-billion dollar server market. Long term both contenders still face the threat of aggressively multithreaded, multi-core architectures Sun Microsystems Inc. has on its road map.”
“IBM said its p690 system using 16 Power4+ processors executed 763,898 transactions per minute (tpm) at a cost of $8.31 per tpm based on the TPC-C benchmark of the Transaction Processing Performance Council. The system beat the HP Superdome server using 64 Itanium 2 processors to deliver 707,102 tpmC at a cost of $8.44 tpmC running Windows Server. IBM said the performance increase in its latest benchmark came mainly from use of a new 1.7 GHz Power4+ as well as a lot of tuning of the IBM AIX Unix and DB2 database software the benchmark was based on,” Merritt reports.
Full article here.
The PowerPC G5 found in Apple’s soon-to-be-released Power Mac G5 is based upon the execution core of IBM
Summary:
Power4 – 47743.62 TPM/chip
Itanium2- 11048.47 TPM/chip
Therefore Power4 is 4.321288 times powerful than Itanium2
I do believe that the IBM version of the Power4+ is multicored with two (or more?) cores within each chip. This would reduce the figures you gave above. so: 763,898/32= 23871.81 per chip with the Power4+ vs. 707,102/64=11048.47 per chip. Still very impressive numbers, but which version of the Itanium did they use for these tests?
Don’t even put the name “Itanium” alongside Power4 or UltraSPARC. Of course, in this crazy world someone will actually buy an Itanium system. And he will be happy about it. That’s how marketing (i.e. FUD) works.