SUN Niagara way faster than IBM. Proof:
Anonymous Coward,
"That is interesting what you say. Could you compare 32-core to 32-core, please?
The website you pointed to says sometihing different. In SAP benchmark, 32 SparcT2 cores are 26% faster than 8 Power6 cores. That means single T2 core is 3.2 times SLOWER than single Power6 core. Please do the calculations yourself."
Well, maybe you havent understand the statement, but I will try to explain to you. He states that one 1.6GHz Niagara CPU is faster than a 5GHz Power6 CPU. He is not discussing core vs core. He is discussing CPU vs CPU. Because you dont buy 1-2 cores. You buy a whole CPU. Right?
Now let us see... If I state that one Niagara is faster than a Power6, does it mean that the Niagaras ALU unit is faster? Or the integer register is faster? Or the Bandwidth is faster? Or one core? Or does it mean that the CPU is faster? What do you think? Could you explain what you think if I say that "this CPU is faster than the other CPU"?
That link you discuss, shows that 4 of the Niagara 1.4GHz CPU is 26% faster than 8 Power6 5GHz CPU. Now, which CPU is faster? Niagara or Power6? (Hint: you can not buy one core, you buy a whole CPU. It is meaningless and dumb to compare parts of a CPU, when we discuss the CPU as a whole)
Here we see 3 of the IBM Power P570 servers with 12 Power6 CPUs at 4.7GHz benchmarked in SIEBEL against 1 SUN T5440 with 4 Niagara CPUs at 1.4GHz. That single Sun machine is twice as fast as 3 of the P570 servers. The SUN machine achieves 14.000 SIEBEL, and 3 of the IBM Power P570 achieves together 7.000 SIEBEL. Further down here, you see links to Oracle web page with white papers with benchmarks, proving this:
http://blogs.sun.com/mandalika/entry/siebel_8_0_on_sun
Here we see price comparison
http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t5440/
IBM P570 with 4 of the 4.7GHz Power6 and 64 GB RAM costs 413.000 USD.
SUN T5440 with 4 of the 1.4GHz Niagara and 64 GB RAM costs 76.000 USD.
You get a fraction of the performance with an IBM Power570 and it costs many times more than one Sun T5440
Anonmous Coward
"T2 is an 8-core CPU, Power6 is 2-core CPU. You have to compare core to core. Processes run on core, not on socket."
You know, you buy one CPU and you the whole of the CPU. You compare Niagara CPU against IBM CPU, right? Because the statement is "Niagara CPU is faster than Power CPU". The statement was not "Part of the Niagara CPU is faster than Power CPU". So let me ask you, which CPU is faster? Now I talk about the CPU. Which processor is fastest? Can you answer that?