IBM Launches p690

edyavno writes: "IBM just announced the launch of their new high-end Unix server p690. It's based on its new Power 4 chip, and is in the same category as just announced Sun's SunFire 15K. It also includes some mainframe level features and can be used either as a single large server or divided into up to 16 "virtual" servers, running any combination of AIX 5L and Linux. Here's yahoo article, and here it is from IBM itself."

Comments

Wrong Comparision

[Doctor_D]

IBM's comparing their new server against the wrong Sun server. Here's why:

For unmatched UNIX system performance, the pSeries 690 can scale to a 32-way symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) helping to provide the scalability required to drive a UNIX datacenter.

A Sun Fire 15k contains up to 106 processors (72 with max i/o), a Sun Enterprise 10k contains up to 64 processors, and a Sun Fire 6800 contains 24 processors. Honestly this IBM server should be compared with either the 10k or 6800. It just can't scale as high as either the 10k or the 15k.

LPAR support for up to 16 UNIX or Linux partitions

Humm, first generation unix partitioning from IBM, or 5th generation partitioning from Sun (with help from Cray early on). BTW, a 10k can be in 16 partitions. No it doesn't require a domain to contain 4 processors--that's the max. A single board domain can have 1 i/o card, 1 cpu and some memory--typically a gig. The 15k and 6800 are similar, although the cpu/memory cards are typically maxed. It is *very* rare to find a company who would buy these sorts of systems to not max them out.

AIX 5L offers support for systems with up to 32 processors and 256 GB memory.

Wow, Solaris scales to 106 procesors in a single domain, with at least 1/2TB of memory. Besides, I'd bet there are more apps for Solaris than AIX.

*Note all of the quotes are from IBM's web page regarding the p690.

Re:Wrong Comparision

[Tower]

disclaimer: I'm an IBM employee (and have played with systems using the POWER4)

First of all, let me mention that the RS/6k S80 (two releases ago - prior to the p680) outdid the 10k, at reduced cost, with the previous generation of procs. 16 processors outdid 64 in many, many tests (including ones with real-world data movement).

As for partitioning... hmmm... let's think. IBM has been doing logical partitioning in AS/400 for a while, and on the S/390 (now the z-series) for quite some time... a few decades now. A lot of that experience went into this.

Regarding the POWER4:
Scalability: The eServer p690 is able to marshal up to 1,000 processors for high-performancesupercomputing duty, in applications such as Business Intelligence or seismic data interpretation. (think - the big supercomputers are right now POWER3, with several POWER4 systems in devel)

Raw power:
Our POWER4 processor can handle seventeen times more data than the UltraSparc III chip used in Sun's brand-new "Star Cat" top-of-the line F150000. Only 32 IBM processors outperform double the number of Ultra Sparcs - which draw much more power, create more heat and are less efficiently packaged than ours, which use modules developed for the eServer z900 mainframe. (The CPU numbers can be found in SPECmark, and from other benchmarks, including TPC-C, Javamarks, and some other fairly useless comparisons).

Re:Wrong Comparision

[cartman]

I'm not meaning to flame, but your analysis was so flawed that I'm amazed it got moderated up to level 4. IBM's hardware is vastly superior to anything Sun has to offer.

First, even though Sun's E15k has 106 processors, only 72 of them are even directly connected to the memory fabric. The others are just PCI cards, with staggering latency, consequently they won't help transaction processing performance. The E15k actually has 72 usable processors; the others are there to impress people who measure system performance by "counting processors."

Second, the UltraSparc III is a notoriously weak performer. It can't even execute instructions out of order!! It is quite likely that IBM's POWER4 would outperform it by more than a factor of 2.

Third, although the p690 has only 32 processors, it has 64 cores. Each "processor" has two 4-way CPUs with a very low latency interconnect. The IBM product would be more accurately characterized as a 64-processor machine.

Fourth, the products from other Unix vendors (hp, ibm) always vastly outperform Sun's product with dramatically fewer processors. HP's new 16 processor box gets almost the same tpc rating as Sun's 64 processor E10k. IBM's old p680 with 24 processors almost doubled the performance of the E10k w/ 64 processors. Sun's most recent comments of "we've decided not to use industry-standard benchmarks any more" is likely because they always lose badly.

Sun's real benefit is in software (Solaris is way better than AIX and has more apps) and in the fact that they have one OS and one proc architecture (Solaris/Sparc) across their entire range of computers.