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IBM Bumps Windows from Top Spot in TPC-C Again

IBM traded places with HP again for the top spot in the Transaction Processing Performance Council OLTP benchmark, bumping a Windows/Itanium-based system with a Unix/RISC system.

It is the second time IBM has bumped a 64-processor HP Superdome system running Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition and Itanium 2 "Madison" processors from the top spot of the closely watched TPC-C benchmark with a system running an entirely Big Blue hardware and software stack. It represents IBM's effort to demonstrate to its customers that it is not prepared to concede the scalability or price-performance battle to Wintel systems, which have improved in performance by about 10 times on the high end in the last four years.

"The notion that HP's Itanium 2 processor-based servers are less expensive than IBM's widely popular Unix eServer systems is a myth," Adalio Sanchez, the general manager for IBM's pSeries Unix servers, said in a statement. "With this new world record IBM continues to deliver customers powerful systems at a very affordable price."

IBM's new TPC-C result hit 763,898 transactions per minute on the TPC-C (tpmC) at a cost of $8.31/tpmC. It represented an 8 percent performance improvement over the HP/Microsoft/Intel result of 707,102 tpmC posted in May. The IBM result is also 1.5 percent cheaper per tpmC.

IBM used an eServer p690 system with 32 POWER4+ processors running AIX and DB2. The POWER4+ generation of processors is nearing the end of its lifecycle, and a more powerful POWER5 line is expected to ship shortly.

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.

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