looks like McJerk is really conceding :-)
HP Itanium big tin plans revealed
Goes after Sun with benchmarketing
By Mike Magee: Friday 05 July 2002, 09:26
THE ITANIUM II processor, formerly codenamed as McKinley, is being positioned as a serious competitor to the Power 4 platform and Sun's UltraSPARCIII, according to documents seen by the INQUIRER.
Those internal HP documents also confirm a set of benchmarks we published earlier this week.
The figures also claim that OLTP tpmC benchmarks mean machines HP will launch this coming Monday show that a four way Itanium II server – the RX5670 – beats machines such as HP's own PA 8600/550MHz RP5470, IBM's six way RS 64 IV/668MHz P660 box, and Dell's PE 8450, a 900MHz eight way IA-32 server based on the old Pentium III "cashcades design".
Those figures are:
HP RX 5670 4 way Itanium II 1GHz 79,000
IBM P660 RS 64 IV 668MHz 6 way 57, 250
Dell PE 8450 Pentium III/900 70,000
HP's RP 5470 PA8600/550MHz 34,000
The HP documents, shown to us by a UK employee of the firm under anonymity also show benchmarks for SAP SD users.
The give the RX5670 a score of 465, a Proliant four way Itanium 800MHz DL590 a score of 195, and an IBM X440 Xeon MP 1.5GHz eight way machine a score of 310.
SPECweb999 SSL connection benchmarks compare the four way HP RX5670 Itanium 2 against the four way Alpha Server ES40/833 and the Sun FIre V480/900 four way, with the results being 1510, 490 and 550 respectively.
As we revealed yesterday, HP will introduce four Itanium 2 machines, a one way ZX 2000, a two way ZX 6000, a two RX 2600 and a four way RX5670. The first two machines are aimed at the workstation market, the last two at the server market.
HP will claim on Monday that its ZX1 chipset for the Itanic will be the "fastest on the market", as much as 20 per cent faster than its opposition, because of high memory bandwidth, low memory latency, big memory capacity, high IO bandwidth and good scaleability. HP says "best", but that will be a matter of opinion.
It will shortly introduce its Pinnacles chipset for eight to 64 way Itanium 2 systems.
It is evident that HP has its eyes set on Sun. A table we scribbled down gives HP what it believes is the lowest cost per transaction on two and four way machines.
That gives a cost of $18 a transaction on the RX2600 two way Itanium 2, $38 on its RX4610 four way machine, as compared to a claimed $164 on the Sun Fire 280R and $378 per transaction on the 220R two way machine.
HP attacks Sun for weak performance on SPARC, an isolated attitude towards IA-64, it criticises Power 4 because its "chipset promise is limited" and there's no AIX support for the Itanic.
And it criticises Dell because it lacks services and support, has a limited product line, and is "commodity only player". µ |
