Entries Tagged 'ibm Dec Apple Cpus' ↓

I read once that Windows Vista has a better control over Dual Core CPUs than Xp. I even read that a dual core CPU would work the same as a CPU of the same GHz but simple core.

This is not true as Windows XP has native support of dual core CPUs. I have never seen any evidence to support this claim, but I have seen evidence of XP being quicker than Vista because it uses fewer resources.

what is the best cpu quad core processor? is it the i5 2500k? anyone have other opinoin becuase im looking to buy a quad core cpu not a 6 core or dual core. please dont tell me the i7 2600k because thats a 6 core processor im jst interested in 4 coress.

If you have the money to spend, Intel will can sell you a 1,050.00 USD i7 but if you value your money, AMD can give you a Phenom II X4 975 for 190.00 USD. and for the performance/benchmark gap, makes you wonder why the heck would I give my hard earned money / tax refund to that pro-expensive company. HELL NO!

Uh, the i7 2600K is a quadcore, not a 6-core. No clue where you got your misinfo from. the only real difference between the i7 2600K and i5 2500K, is the 2600K features Hyperthreading; the 2500K does not. But both are pretty much on par with each other in everything, especially games. I have the 2500K, and currently have it clocked at 4.5GHz. They overclock like mad.

The i5 is good but also look into AMD Phenom x4 processors. AMD is quite a bit cheaper than Intel and in some cases faster. however, make sure that you have a good heat sink because they overheat a little easier.

i7 2600k is not 6 core, it's 4 core… I own one. It's also better than the 2500k and probably the best on the market right now.

2600k is 4 core…. look at link below

I have a Dell M90 laptop with a Nvidia Quadro FX 1500M. I heard I can upgrade the video card and want to know what kind of socket it is, and what is compatible

Also, the CPU socket and where to buy them would be nice too.

Thanks

IBM is slowly working toward quad-core chips…

a. Who put out the first commerical multicore processor chip? Sun – Duh no; it was a little blue company

b. is putting out a commerically viable multicore processor more difficult than putting out a commerically viable high speed processor? Don’t know but I think it is unless the all cores share functional resources beyond the caches.

IBM avoids any comparison to Sun CMT The reason is the T series CMT servers are not comparable to IBM p570 & p560 servers, the entry p520 and p550 are more comparable. before you start on saying show me the data – I find data on CMT servers very difficult to find. Do detailed whitepapers describing RAS, virtualization overheads of LDOMs (unless there are none – which is difficult to believe)and relative performance between generations of servers similar to rPerf (I know Sun has M Values but never seen public documents released periodically or ever to show these values) exist somewhere on Sun’s site?

IBM again plays games when talking about old Sun systems to un-realeased IBM servers. IBM’s comparison is with the M5000…sorry I thought the M5000 is a current server; am I mistaken or was it a Freudian slip on your part?"with the new Power 560 Express clients can save up to 80 percent of the energy by consolidating 13 Sun fire V490 servers on a single Power 560 server with PowerVM compared to consolidating those same servers on four Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers with Dynamic system Domains."

IBM considers the p570 equivalent as the M8000. So on the M class servers why don’t Sun do progressive benchmarks showing the scaling performance of the servers with 4, 8 & 16 processors with same ratio of memory on the same benchmark?

IBM uses max watts for site planning guides When you are designing the data center power & cooling requirements I would take the max rate power and cooling requirements of the servers (just in case I upgrade) rather than the typical power and cooling requirements. unless you have a capping mechanism – do the CMT or SPARC64 servers have such a functionality? IBM has EnergyScale to do just than on the p boxes.

And in your comparisons can we stick to one server model and compare based on cores or processors and not switch back and forth.

Incidentally, the M9000 performance benchmark on SAP SD2T was impressive but I am curious why Sun stopped the benchmark with 67% CPU utilization and why there has not been a subsequent update on the result with the typical 97+% utilization we see from all vendors including Sun for other systems.

IBM only has Dual core chips, now quad-core modules. Way behindSun going to 8-cores and 16-cores on a chip!

IBM avoids any comparison to Sun CMT: because 2-chip Sun T5240 OUTPERFORMSp570 (8RU server)! IBM can’t beat the performance so they alwaysmisdirect people to comparing to cheaper IBM servers that are VERY VERYSLOW compared to CMT. Customers are pulling out p570s and replacingwith lower-cost, faster, smaller Sun T5240. IBM, read and weap.Sun publishes benchmarks and doesn’t rely on making up numbers like rperf.

Venki actually IBM’s comparison is: "with the new Power 560 Express …by consolidating 13 Sun fire V490 servers"

venki writes: "Sun do progressive benchmarks showing the scaling performance of the servers with 4, 8 & 16 processors with same ratio of memory on the same benchmark?" How out full system performance. customers tire of IBM alwaystalking about core performance and avoiding system performance.

IBM still avoiding measuring watts, looking at max watts is a marketing paper game. show us DATA!

Venki writes: "Incidentally, the M9000 performance benchmark on SAP SD2T was impressive", yep it has more headroom. too bad IBM is maxed out.

As a Sun shareholder, I’d like to see a more mature and complete response to Venki than "read and weep". if it’s true that a single Power 560 server is equivalent to 4 Sun M5000 servers, then this is bad news for me and my shares!

I agree with Venki that comparing Power processors (fast single thread performance) with the Sun T2 processor doesn’t make any sense at all. Face it, they are different beasts with different abilities. It would be nice if we could compare with Rock but it’s a bit er late?

Finally, I wouldn’t complain about IBM pre-releasing news given Sun’s record of hype. Where is my download of xVM Server? I believe you announced it a few weeks ago? Where is Rock? Where are servers with SSDs? Pot calling the kettle black?

Let’s get past the rhetoric and start some real analysis here please. thank you.

Kevin it is simple Venki went off topic. — why do IBM supporters always do that? this was about the shortcomings of the Power6 sytems that we have to wait to see until very late this year. I wait eagerly for POWER6 results on different MHZ dimms, I wait for measured watts on Power6 on EVERY benchmark.

Venki since you have so much you want to claim, why don’t you post it onyour blog and I’ll comment.

If I am a customer running Java Serving, SAP, Oracle, MySQL, Web serving etc. I look at what a whole system (example car) does I don’t look at the performance of a single sub-component (example Piston ring). Why doesn’t IBM publish more whole-system benchmarks and show measured power on each. as an IBM shareholder doesn’t it scare you that IBM avoids real data in public?

IBM can’t beat CMT on system-wide performance so…* IBM changes the topic* IBM avoids real data that points to performance* IBM avoids real measured watts on known applications or benchmarks* IBM name calls CMT servers different, because they can’t beat it on SYSTEM performance.

I could do more real analysis if IBM allowed any data in public. but it is much easier for Venki to use rhetoric.

Venki you:* call CMT servers different without data, let’s see whole system perfon realistic workload or benchmarks * Venki please post processor scaling on p560, or p570 with different GHz on INDUSTRY standard benchmarks* or publish the exact definition of rPerf, lack of clear definition allows IBM to just make up numbers, please show the definition.* publish the overhead of any IBM virtualization platform, I’ve postedpointers that show big overheads, then mysteriously IBM marketing deletes to cover up any data on IBM websites.

Notice the un-released IBM p560 has many shortcomings, it cost what $250K even with mid-size memory. It can only support 96GB of fast memory or you lose a whole lot of memory perf and use 500Mhz dimms.

A lot of FUD being thrown around here, especially from BMSeer. It just funny reading nonsense assertions.

1. P560 is supposed to be a cut down p570 that is available for less price. Not sure why you are bringing this up.2. P560 still supports more memory than any CMT Sun server.3. People replacing P570 with Sun CMT? Where are you getting the data for this? last time I looked, IBM was extending their lead in Unix servers.4. Could you show me any data that "Sun have more configurable systems than IBM and a lot more expansion possibilities".

You blogged, made observations/comments that are not bearing and I pointed them out; you blog also allows for comments. if you don’t want questions remove that ability from your blog.

Your comments to which I responded.. I don’t see I was off topic…* IBM is slowly working toward quad-core chips…* IBM avoids any comparison to Sun CMT…* IBM uses max watts for site planning guides …so how was I off topic…I added one question on which I was curious – on why the M9000 benchmark was capped at 67% utilization.

You responded to these supposidely off topic comments in your response but in your second response I am off topic and you are asking me to post benchmark data – I think you need to ask IBM to do that and not me.

I just questioned why Sun does not do a benchmark which allows (potential & existing) customers to evaluate the scaling of a server. if I am running any of these "Java Serving, SAP, Oracle, MySQL, Web serving etc."don’t you think this would be useful information for me to evaluate and size my requirements on Sun servers.

What ever the numbers that IBM makes up for rPERF, IBM publishes it on their public website and that forces IBM to stand behind it to some manner. this allows customers who have customized code to make some evaluation of what their upgrade requirements will be when they move from an old server to a new generation server. We don’t have a similar matrix from Sun – I didn’t ask for audited benchmark values just a public document showning relative performance across various generations and types of SPARC processor-based servers.

CMT-based servers do nota. have high single threaded performanceb. Work very well when there are fewer independent threads (say less than 16)c. support is for robust virtualization (with independent OS instances) with dedicated I/O (say 5 partitions) d. support hot pluggable components such PCI adapterse. support Instruction retry in the processor, alternate processor recoveryAnd if I have to license Oracle Enterprise software; fewere processors cores) help and CMT server because of the not so important factor of per core performance tend to be expensive.

Sun UltraSPARC IV is actually two cores of UltraSPARC III in the same die, and it will be end-of-life at the end of this year. SPARC64 is an OEM product from Fujitsu. Niagara is based on UltraSPARC II and acquired from Afara Websystem, not from Sun’s internal R&D (Hey, where is UltraSPARC V and Gemini ? ). The biggest problem with Niagara is those 8 cores share a small number of L2 cache (4 MB) and the threads do not run simultaneously.

You really need to separate out HW & SW issues, most open developers where only focusing on a few cores, and the software shows it. many people are now working to split locks an make sure that MySQL & PostGres scale to lots of cores, because EVERYONE is doing lots of cores these days. So you might be better off judging system performance by applications and benchmarks that have already eliminated software bottlenecks. I showed benchmarks above.

Don’t worry MySQL and PostGres are rapidly growing up to work on bigger systems. YEAH!

Heatphlux you are pointing to 2-year old SW and older T2000 not UltraSPARC T2 Plus, so don’t draw too many conclusions about the present.

Basically an UltraSPARC II core is a bad conclusion too. Why not look at system performance now?

… ok way too late now, gonna run.

I still remember when apple switched from Power to Intel how they were saying how the Intel CPUs are 2 times faster.

ahhh the Power vs Sparc battle….. you know why Power will eventually loose the battle?

@BM Seer : We were using multicores Xeon as a comparison to Niagara. We didn’t need to tune the application on Xeon and the performance was very good.

Sun sales person always talked about throughput instead of response time, but the customer really need a very good response time performance. one more thing, previously the customer used the UltraSPARC III, and looking for a replacement. The story is end up with a lot of confusion. Why Xeon is performing better than Sun’s own Niagara in term of response time ? Do you want me to say this to the customer : "please wait until your transaction is bigger than XXX transaction per second, then you will see Niagara is better than Xeon. "

That’s why, after read some text book and informations, I conclude that individual core performance is still very important.

@Z : We are discussing on CPU instead of OS. For OS, I think Linux is the best UNIX (clone) at this moment.

The question was not "why customers are switching from p570 to CMT" (this ain’t happening) the question was WHERE IS YOUR PROOF TO YOUR FUD CONTENTION THAT CUSTOMERS ARE SWITCHING FROM IBM p570s TO SUN CMT SERVERS? Do you have it?(Please don’t keep twisting statements you made and the questions we ask if you are unable to answer them).

The proof points are yet to be shown by you.

I accept all your benchmark facts as true, can’t deny the black & white of the results and am not even debating it with you at this point. but I have few questions – a. Do you think that when customers buy servers they consider the total cost of ownership? I think they do. while Sun likes to say number of cores don’t matter, and try hide this fact by calling the chip a processor, customers who have to pay for software say it does; so what would be the total cost of acquistion if the cost of the software (say Oracle App server, Oracle DB Enterprise) is also considered? Care to define the difference in Oracle license costs for each of comparisons you made. (Ohh, I know SAP is not licensed based on processor but some of the other applications on those servers would be like backup software, enterprise management software, etc.. are.)

PS. You did not suprise me… not a straight answer to a single question.

Things are getting hotter here. I understand this blog belongs to SUN because it is hosted in sun.com domain. of course BMSeer you may have the right to say whatever you want to say whether it is true or not. but you will loose credibility (fortunately not SUN), if you can’t prove the things right. here is some examples :

1. You always claim Niagara machine is the best throughput machine in the world and it is benchmarked by specint2006_rate as an example. I got T5120 (1 chip, 8 core and 64 thread) and the specint2006_rate is 83.9 with gccfs. since T5120 has 8 cores and 64 threads, so the test is copied 63 times over whole threads. So per core performance is 83.9/8 = 9.3. I checked SUN’s X4150 (2 chip, 8 core and 8 thread) has 133. So per core performance for Intel is 133/8 = 16.625. How about M4000 (4 chip, 16 core and 32 thread). M4000 performance is 135. So per core performance is 135/16 = 8.4. You already know the performance of p570 ( 8 chip, 16 core, 32 thread) is 478. So Power6 per core performance is 478/16 = 29.8. this per core performance already explained the performance problem of Niagara CPU. this Niagara CPU can’t even beat Intel and too far to be compared with Power6. in term of total throughput alone T5120 even can’t beat X4150. So I can’t understand what you are trying to claim or probably SUN through the information on their website.

2. if you think SUN has a very superior machine in the world especially for Database server, where is SUN’s TPC-C number ? I know you will always be defensive by saying TPC-C is not relevant anymore, but please don’t attack to anybody while even you can’t prove you are better than anybody.

I guess you are trying to distort your SUN’s performance number with your "technical marketing" information. I understand you may try to defend and attack as much as you can, but you have to prove whatever you say is justifiable.

Venki writes: "WHERE IS YOUR PROOF TO YOUR FUD CONTENTION THAT CUSTOMERS ARE SWITCHING FROM IBM p570s TO SUN CMT SERVERS? Do you have it?"

I have dealt with dozens customers who have SWITCHED because of performance issues, can’t mention names. So yes you will deny it and point to vague statements of IBM market growth.

Venki writes: "I accept all your benchmark facts as true, can’t deny the black & white of the results and am not even debating it with you at this point."

Yes that compelling performance data is part of the reason people switch.Note these benchmarks support performance, power-performance, $/performance claims.

Venki writes: "a. Do you think that when customers buy servers they consider the total cost of ownership? cost of the software (say Oracle App server, Oracle DB Enterprise) is also considered? Care to define the difference in Oracle license costs for each of comparisons you made."

Yes this is a common IBM marketing attack point. Yes let’s talkTCO and mention hardware costs. The IBM systems beaten in the benchmarks mentioned previously costs $500,000 for 8 cores with same memory use in benchmarks, CMT costs 4x less (2RU server). now lets talk watt/performance since we’re all concerned about energy costs – why do those same IBM servers waste 4 times the watts per every unit of work? Calling it TCO and just pointing to the fact that some software is licensed per core is FUD that ignores all other cost factors. Add it up and Sun wins.

Venki You did not suprise me… not an original question, just the same ones that IBM marketing continues to shout. You guys lose lots of credibility that way.

Dono: system performance is what customer care about. what is your next arguement performance/transister? TPC-C problems(see tag cloud), many benchmarks have database as part of it being run by CMT. Most importantly many customers are using CMT as a database server right now.

Heatplux: CMT has long ago proven 2005, that it beats competition on performance at Web, application, and database on a huge number of different workloads & benchmarks.

So, confidentiality stops you. and to your assurances that dozens of customers have moved off IBM, I’m sure IBM would be saying the same thing wrt Sun servers (those would be lies concoted by IBM according to you). The market data shows no drop in IBM AIX sales and subsequent increase in market share of Sun (sorry, according to Gratner customers seem to actually be moving off Sun – a drop in revenue and a drop to the #2 UNIX vendor).

There is a local saying (roughly translated) "The quality of the cake depends on how much you paid for it". Intel x64 servers are relatively cheap, mainframes are expensive but I don’t see people trying to run mainframe applications on an Intel x64 server.PS the TCO of a mainframe vis-a-vis a x64 server is less when considering the cost per transaction but very expensive when compared of a single system to single system basis.

So, coming back to you point of looking at the cost of the power & cooling:a. IBM p570 draws more power and deliver more work than a CMT server without having to rework standard applications to support huge numbers of mutually exclusive threads. in niche workload areas such as web serving, Java app (where these parameters can be set on JAS)are best served by horizontal scaling so IBM put up their Power blades. So your comparison should be with these blades (but you want to show huge cost savings and that would not meet your "marketing" objective and want to compare a CMT with an enterprise p570 – do you honestly think IBM would use a p570 for this workload if consolidated/virtualization was not a requirement)b. You convienently ignored the software cost (this can in cases be more expensive than the cost of the hardware or that of power and cooling. SO WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE IN THE COST OF SOFTWARE LICENSES (ORACLE DB ENTERPRISE EDITION – US$47,000/- per license (0.75 license per core), ORACLE APPLICATION SERVERS (do you want these costs also))? c. YOU ALSO HAVEN’T ANSWERED IF CMT SERVERS HAVE THE CAPABILITY TO THROTTLE THE POWER CONSUMED? (I don’t think they can and that is why you are silent on this?)

Hey, about IBM losing credibility – the prelim results for this Qrt is beating market expectations and their growth in marketshare in UNIX servers shows that their credibility is not at risk.

Sun’s drop in UNIX server marketshare; its continued delays and cancellations in delivering promised products (US-V, Rock, etc.) and now Sun need to OEM from Fujitsu to have a credible product line is what exactly leads to a loss of credibility.

Maybe… what IBM harps on about is what customers are really concerned about; maybe thats why customers are buying their servers. maybe Sun should listen.

I understand that a single Sparc64 VII (quad core) does about 40 Gigaflops. I guess that’s why it’s going into the Sun M3000 you’re announcing tomorrow. what does a single Power6 (quad core) achieve? I searched all over the web and couldn’t find any specs for Power6. Weird huh?

The T2 has been around for a while now and Intel is catching up fast. is there a T3 on the way? if not, what’s going to succeed the T2 and T2+ processors?

The peak FLOPs calculation is :Flops = Clock speed x FP calculations

For a Power6 @4.7GHz processor (IBM counts each core of the chip as 1 processor)Flops per core = 4.7GHz x 4 = 18.8 GigaflopsFlops per chip (2 cores) = 37.6 Gigaflops

Power6 Quadcore @ 3.6GHz would beFLOPS per core = 3.2GHz x 4 = 12.8GigaFLOPSFLOPS per chip (4 cores) = 12.8 GFLOPS x 4 = 51.2 GigaFLOPS

PS I also couldn’t find any details on the web on Power6 Quadcore except old news reports speculating where Power6 is going next.

Hope this helpsVenki

Z hit the nail on the head.

AIX is appalling. Edit inittab and the whole thing tumbles down. On Solaris you can even delete it!

Power is getting to be exactly what it says on the tin – and uses it by the nuclear powerstation load. they are ferocious processors but the overall design and the crap IBM software stack negates any performance benefit they might get.

Some of the hot air blown out the back of the Power6 P570′s should be turned into useful work…

Give me two Sun boxes to run active:active vs two AIX jobbies, I might not have the same power, but it’ll be reliable, cheaper to run, easier to use (ever used DLPAR – I’ve seen it bring down other lpars!), and if I do run out of steam I can buy another two Sun servers and still have change left over from buying big blue.

Let’s look at the state of the processor industry. It is fair to use cores per chip as a metric to evaluate the sophistication of a particular processor vendor. Today on x86, AMD is at 4 cores per chip on Barcelona, Intel is at 6 cores per chip on Dunnington. On EPIC, Intel is at 2 cores per chip on Itanium. in RISC, SPARC is at 4 cores per chip on SPARC64 and 8 cores per chip on Niagara. POWER is at 2 cores per chip. Next year, Intel goes to 8 cores per chip on x86 with Nehalem, and 4 cores per chip on EPIC with Tukwila.

Like it or not, more cores per chip, not more MHz per core, is the trend in the industry. The fact is, IBM could have done more cores at lower frequency if it wanted to. Heck, it did on the Z6 mainframe version of POWER6. I guess IBM cannot get the yield on the quad-core POWER processors, so it had to do the QCM thing again with POWER6.

As for anyone saying the T5440 is not comparable to the POWER 570 or POWER 560 based on enterprise features, that is just bunk. That was a viable complaint against the T1000, but not the larger CMT systems.

From a price and market segment, it seems the POWER 560 and T5440 are very similar in target markets.

…cores per chip as a metric to evaluate the sophistication of a particular processor vendor..

Simply putting more simple cores on a chip does not prove the sophistication of the vendor; it is technically more difficult to have speed racer chip then populate more cores. When does core population become sophisticated – when the vendor is able to have core share functional units to get higher utilization on clock cycles, which Sun has failed in the UltraSPARC T2 & T2+ processors.

Consider that, SPARC64 as it evolved from dual core to quad core actually dropped performance per core while increasing clock speed. Check the per core performance on SPARC64 VI & VII, say in the SAP 2D2T benchmarks, you will notice a dramatic drop in the per core performance. Do you consider this a good design?

IBM’s quad core delivered less performance than the dual-core versions but at a lower clock speed.

While the increase in cores per chip (without equivalent performance per core)improves the "per socket" performance it also increases your software licensing costs.

Then if the CMT servers are a viable choice for all workloads with the sophisticated RAS features – then why does Sun even bother to resell the Fujitsu boxes? It should just gone to market with just the CMT servers.The answer lies in that for certain workloads the CMT’s dependence on a profusion of light threads does not works – for example HPC workloads, data warehouseing, etc.. (PS I have not seen any benchmarks from Sun for those workloads).

I agree the IBM entry servers & blades are the right models to compare with the CMT servers. BMSeer insists on comparing CMT with p570 and then does a cost comparison; thats like IBM marketing doing a comparison of p550 with M9000 and claiming that the p550 has better price performance then the M9000.

bmseer – please show how scientifically Sun came to call a chip a processor?- It is no less arbitrary than IBM calling a core a processor.- IBM has maintained calling a core a processor since 2001 when the first commerical multicore chip (POWER 4) came out.

Sorry, bm I was asking Kevin if it helps him to understand, for you nothings help as you just won’t listen.

Still no answers on a. Licensing,b. On energy throttling, or c. Proof of customers switching en mass (from IBM to Sun).

1. Again, for such workloads IBM would propose their blades – please compare power consumption with such, not a p570. 2. Simple YES or NO answer – IF I WANTED TO THROTTLE POWER ON CMT SERVER CAN I DO IT?

LOL, great read ! BM Seer you have surpassed yourself this time !

"AIX is appalling. Edit inittab and the whole thing tumbles down. On Solaris you can even delete it!"

Dont be a complete tool. Learn how to use AIX properly then before you start messing with it. as a long term Solaris and AIX sysadmin, and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that AIX is in a different league to Solaris. Far more stable, managable, graceful….etc etc etc etc. as for DLPAR, i suggest that again, most probably YOU at fault. It works just fine for me, and always has.

You IBM guys are slick & tricky (changing the topic… nah let’s look at slower blades) OK pick your workload: Web, application serving, or database. Don’t bait and switch to slower blades when a comparison get’s uncomfortable.

Venki, help me understand your power throttling, so I can answer the question. if I had an IBM 4-chip (dual-core) 8-core 4.7GHz 4.7GHz power6 that draws 1080watts as measured (max 1400W).

Venki please tell me the performance level if you throttled that 4chip dual-core p570 4.7GHz with the fast memory to 500watts?

I need to understand how useful that features is to answer the question. Published data is preferred, but likely not available I fear.

Mistake I severely underestimated that watts:2160watts for an IBM 8-core 4.7GHz p570 (max 2800watts)1080watts for an IBM 4-core 4.7GHz p570 (Max 1400watts)

You IBM guys are slick & tricky (changing the topic… nah let’s look at slower blades) OK pick your workload: Web, application serving, or database. Don’t bait and switch to slower blades when a comparison get’s uncomfortable.

(CORRECTED: Venki, help me understand your power throttling, so I can answer the question. if I had an IBM 4-chip (dual-core) 8-core 4.7GHz 4.7GHz power6 that draws 2160watts as measured (max 2800W).

Venki please tell me the performance level if you throttled that 4chip dual-core (8core) p570 4.7GHz with the fast memory to 500watts? I guessyou only get 1/4 the performance. Yes or no?

I need to understand how useful that features is to answer the question. Published data is preferred, but likely not available I fear.

BM Seer, do you really expect us to beleive that your "customers", who have spent "millions" investing in Power 6 in the past 12 months, are now throwing away that investment and moving to Niagara based servers ?

I put it to you sir, that you are talking nonsense !

From Sun’s press release: "Sun reported 83 percent year-over-year billings growth in its Solaris-based Chip Multi-Threading systems as customers continued to demand the nearly 10,000 applications available for Solaris 10, while enjoying integrated virtualization and exceptional power efficiency."

If you look at the IBM numbers below are some scary facts, now notice IBM doesn’t have clear reporting and IBM changes its "accounting" for p-series and other servers to cloud the numbers. but if you take the time to investigate…

Power Series +7%iSeries down -82%

IBM has merged the old p-series and i-series into the new p-series. So, this way moving forward, the new p-series will show improvements over last year (due to the addition of i-series business).

It is safe to say that IBM’s p-series likely was flat to lower Vs last year. and, x-series (x86) business was way down (-15%) including a drop in their blades business.

Alex gives sweeping generalizations, I show the numbers. I also take to customers that are switching. in the end IBM can probably find customers that are switching the other way in this big world.

But let’s get back to the benchmarks: very expensive IBM hardware is getting beaten in perfomance, $/performance, and certainly in power/performance.

Sun’s 4RU CMT Sun Enterprise T5440 beats performance of IBM’s $1M 16-core 16RU system, etc… see the next postings.