IBM is busy showing off how its hot new POWER7-based Power Systems not only produce excellent performance -- it's also boasting how a Power 780 can slash database licensing and maintenance costs by using fewer, energy-efficient cores.
Using a sliver of its total, 64-core processing power, IBM says its Power 780 system has become the first server to deliver more than 1.2 million transactions-per-minute on only eight cores, according to Transaction Processing Performance Council results on April 9, 2010. With price/performance of less than 70 cents per transaction per minute, IBM says the Power 780's 1.2 million transactions-per-minute sets a new record in performance-per-core -- 4.6 times better than an HP Superdome and 7.5 times better than a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 cluster running Oracle RAC.
For businesses that run SAP, the Power 780 handled 37,000 users on 64 cores -- 16 percent more users than a 256-core Sun Enterprise M9000 and 130 percent more users than a 64-core Fujitsu system running Intel Xeon X7560 chips.
Record-Setting Performance for Web and Analytics Workloads
The Power 780 also demonstrated the ability to deliver leadership, workload-optimized performance by setting new records across the three major industry-standard processor benchmarks for Java, integer, and high-performance-computing workloads, achieving between 1.8 and three-times the performance of all other competitive published eight-socket results, IBM notes.
IBM is also touting how its Power Systems' built-in virtualization provides the ability to scale virtual machines to the full capacity of the system -- up to eight-times more than VMware. IBM testing indicates clients deploying virtualization may see up to 65 percent more performance-per-virtual machine on a Power 750 Express running PowerVM than a similarly configured HP DL380 G6 running VMware.
Overall, IBM says its latest benchmark results continue to demonstrate that IBM Power Systems are able to deliver more compute power with fewer cores and less energy consumption than Sun/Oracle and HP/Itanium based servers. This performance leadership across all major workloads, combined with Power systems' built-in virtualization technology means clients can achieve dramatic cost savings and energy efficiency in their data centers. For instance, IBM illustrates, by using 87 percent fewer cores than a Sun SPARC Enterprise Cluster to deliver more than one million transactions per minute, the Power 780 allows clients to slash database licensing and maintenance costs by up to 80 percent.
More Detail on the Claims:
Transaction performance based on tpmC results as on 4/9/2010. Source: Transaction Processing Performance Council,
http://www.tpc.org as of 4/9/10. IBM result submitted on 4/13/10. IBM Power 780 with 2 processor chips, 8 cores, 16 threads achieved 1,200,011 tpmC @ $.69 $/tpmC. Database was DB2 9.1 on AIX 6.1. System availability is 10/13/2010. tpmC per core is 150,001. HP Integrity Superdome with 64 processor chips, 128 cores, 256 threads achieved 4,092,799 tpmC @ $2.93 $/tpmC. Database was Oracle 10g on HP-UX 11i v3. System availability was 8/6/2007. tpmC per core is 31,975. Sun/Oracle T5440 cluster with 48 processor chips, 384 cores, 3,072 threads achieved 7,646,486 tpmC @ $2.36 $/tpmC. Database was Oracle 11g EE RAC on Solaris 10. System availability was 3/19/2010. tpmC per core is 19,913. IBM x3850 M2 with 4 processor chips, 16 cores, 16 threads achieved 516,752 tpmC @ $2.59 $/tpmC. Database was DB2 9.5 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. System availability was 3/14/2008. tpmC per core is 32,297.
The IBM Power 780 achieved the highest result ever published on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard application benchmark running SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP application Release 6.0 (Unicode) with a result of 37,000 SAP SD benchmark users. The 64-core Power 780 handled 16 percent more users than a 256-core Sun Enterprise M9000 (Oracle's biggest system) and 130 percent more users than a 64-core Fujitsu 1800E system running Intel's Xeon X7560 chip. IBM Power System 780, 8p / 64–c / 256–t, POWER7, 3.8 GHz, 1024 GB memory, 37,000 SD users, dialog resp.: 0.98s, line items/hour: 4,043,670, Dialog steps/hour: 12,131,000, SAPS: 202,180, DB time (dialog/ update):0.013s / 0.031s, CPU utilization: 99%, OS: AIX 6.1, DB2 9.7, cert# 2010013; SUN M9000, 64p / 256-c / 512–t, 1156 GB memory, 32,000 SD users, SPARC64 VII, 2.88 GHz, Solaris 10, Oracle 10g , cert# 2009046; Fujitsu 1800E, 8p / 64-c / 128-t, 512 GB memory, 16,000 SD users, Intel Xeon X7560, 2.26 GHz, Windows Server 2008 R2 DE, SQL Server 2008, cert#: 2010010. All results are 2-tier, SAP EHP 4 for SAP ERP 6.0 (Unicode) and valid as of 4/1/2010.
Best in class 8-socket results: IBM Power 780 64-core (3.86 GHz, 8 chips, 8 cores/chip,4 threads/core) SPECint_rate2006 result of 2,526; IBM Power 780 64-core (3.86 GHz, 8 chips, 8 cores/chip,4 threads/core) SPECfp2006 result of 2,240; IBM Power 780 64-core (8 chips, 128 threads) 3.86 GHz IBM Power 780 System running AIX V6.1 with a SPECjbb2005 result of 5,210,501 bops (81,414 bops/JVM).
Competitive 8-socket results: SPECint_rate2006: Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 1800E 64-core (Intel Xeon X7560, 8 chips, 8 cores/chip, 2 threads/core) SPECint_rate2006 result of 1339; SPECfp_rate 2006: SGI Altix ICE 8200EX 32-core (Intel Xeon X5570, 2.93 GHz, 8 chips, 4 cores/chip, 2 threads/core) SPECfp_rate2006 result of 742; SPECjbb2005: Hewlett-Packard Company, HP DL785 G6 achieved 1,984,616 bops (248,077 bops/JVM on a 480core system (8 chips, 48 threads).
SPEC and the benchmark names SPECrate, SPECint, and SPECjbb are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Benchmark results stated reflect results published on
http://www.spec.org as of April 8, 2010.