“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