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

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).