IBM grills HP with 4.7GHz Power6-based box IBM's protracted Power6 dance ended today with the revelation of a midrange server that shows blistering benchmark numbers. Big Blue has announced a revamped version of its p 570 system that can hold one to eight of the new 4.7GHz dual-core Power6 chips. When running the TPC benchmark, an eight-way version of the p 570 reached …
This goes for all vendors -
I would like to see the TPC benchmarks as they are currently performed. However it would be great if TPC would make it a requirement to provide a real world example of the configuration and have it run the benchmark as a baseline.
The TPC mark of 1.6M transactions comes at a price of 1 transaction for $3.54.
The p570 with it's 8 Power6 cores also has the following
768GB RAM
21 Dual Ported 4 Gb Fibre Channel adapters
3312 36GB 15K 4Gb FC Drives
168 73GB 15k 4Gb FC Drives
I would like to see IBM publish a second TPC with the following configuration:
8 Power6 Processors
64GB RAM
2 Dual Port FC Cards
32 146GB 15k 4Gb FC Drives. Configured in a RAID 1+0 configuration
I never could understand why IBM designed their blades so you couldn't actually run a full chassis at 100% as there wasn't enough power in the chassis, but now I see it was because they wanted to save power in the datacenter for these 4.7GHz Superovens! Or maybe we should name them Supernovas.
So, Sun will have chips that can real fast but only with massively multi-threaded apps, and IBM will have massively hot boxes that will run fast if you rewrite the code (and base your datacenter in the Antartic), and HP will have boxes that will run four different OSes so you can pick and choose your OS/app stack for best performance and change it at will.... My money's still on the Itaniums.
We currently have power5 boxes and since the power consumption is about the same, can't wait to get these boxes. Which would most likely be early next year.
When SUN releases the rock, we would be set. We will have our web servers (SUN) while also having our backend servers (IBM).
Blades, blades - nah pal, these processors are destined for proper systems, not the pile 'em dense and see 'em cheap brigade.
According to all the docs I've seen the Power6's use the same power (or less?) than the p5/p5+ equivalent. Hence I would have thought that the heat production of the new processors would be equivalent to the older kit, heck with the clockdown/power-off function for parts of the p6, you might even find it's heating the datacentre less.
Itanic? Ha! I still find it incredible that a company that can produce something so good as the Core family still make something so incredibly average.
I'll be looking forward to getting my Power6 kit, and fascinated to see what riposte Sun will issue to the Power6 line - we live in interesting times!
Actually, according to the configurator on the HP website, an rx8640 with 16 cores with max RAM only uses 3.96KW, even with internal disks.... But then that's a bit apples and oranges, 16 cores is just two cellboards or half an rx8640. Or, come quad-core Itaniums, just a quarter of an rx8640 (or rx8660, or whatever they'll be calling it then).
Agreed, I can see the point of Rock at the webedge, they have scalding performance for webserving as long as there's nothing more complex than serving up static pages. However, if you want those webservers to do anything fancy like a bit of SQL then suddenly even old Xeon canes T1 systems. And the reality is a lot of companies just want a commodity front end, they take the path of least resistance (to them change means additional risk) so they don't even go for Linux, they just go with Windows on blades.
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