Duke, WOW! Those benchmarks are AMAZING!
The TPC scores just blow the competition out of the water!
79,000k TPmC is what Itanium 2 gets in a 4-way configuration. Many thought that the main competition for Itanium 2 would be Intel's own Xeon processor. Yet Itanium 2 beats Dell in an 8-way configuration by more than 12%. Of course, that's the much older Cascades Xeon running at 900MHz. It would be much better to compare against other 4-way Xeon MP systems using the Willamette core and large on-die L3 caches, as well as Hyperthreading. I looked on the TPC web page ( tpc.org ), and found the following submissions for 4-way Xeon MP systems.
Vendor System TPmC TPmC/$
NEC Express5800/140Hc 48150.72 6.45 US$
Dell PowerEdge 6600/4/1.6GHz 34914.92 5.27 US$
HP ProLiant DL580-G2-4P 48911.83 6.56 US$
Fujitsu PRIMERGY R450 48906.18 8.84 Euros
IBM e(logo) xSeries 440 c/s 55138.6 6.98 US$
The fastest model uses IBM's xSeries 440 chipset, which has a large chipset cache (which increases the performance, but reduces the price / performance). But even comparing against that one, the HP Itanium 2 server has a 43% performance advantage. You can see Itanium 2 processor's true colors begin to emerge on high end applications. The only other very important vector here is the price. If HP can get a price / performance close to the Xeon submissions, then the performance should really help to sell the product. I can see very many enthusiastic Itanium 2 customers if an HP system can run their database as well as it does in the TPC setup.
But besides Intel's Xeon processor, Itanium 2 stands up very well to the other 4-way competition.
Vendor System TPmC TPmC/$
HP AlphaServer ES45 Model 68/1000 50117 15.24 US$
HP hp server rp5470 34288.77 15.26 US$
As well as 8-way competition.
Vendor System TPmC TPmC/$
IBM eServer pSeries 660 Model 6M1 105025.02 23.45 US$
HP hp server rp 7400 60366.82 17.64 US$
Again, if HP is able to get the price / performance close to the Xeon submissions, they should be able to easily conquer any other RISC competitors, whose current ratios in that department are much lower than the Intel based equivalent. In most cases, too, Itanium 2 looks to beat most 8-way RISC systems in overall performance.
I am also especially impressed with the SAP benchmark, which you might know is as "real world" as one can get. It actually uses the SAP application, which according to the web page, boasts, "10 Million Users. 44,500 Installations. 1,000 Partners. 21 Industry Solutions." The HP Itanium 2 system gets a score of 465.
Here is how that compares with other SAP submissions using Intel's Xeon MP processor, and some other RISC competitors.
Vendor System Processor Memory Processors Score
NEC Express5800 Model 140Hc Xeon MP 1.6 GHz 4096 4 342
HP Model TC7100 / RC 7100 Xeon MP 1.6 GHz 4096 4 315
Fujitsu Primergy H450 Xeon MP 1.6 GHz 4096 4 348
IBM eServer xSeries Model440 Xeon MP 1.6 GHz 8192 4 312
HP AlphaServer ES45 EV6.8CB 1000 MHz 16384 4 420
Sun Sun-Fire V880 US III 900 MHz 32768 8 600
IBM eServer pSeries Mod p670 Power4 1.1 GHz 65536 8 860
HP ProLiant DL 760 PIII Xeon 900MHz 6144 8 382
IBM eServer xSeries Model440 Xeon MP 1.6 GHz 8192 8 520
With more than 33% performance over the fastest Xeon product and nearly 10% advantage over the 4-way RISC submission, the HP Itanium 2 system should blow the 4-way competition out of the water in this benchmark. However, it remains to be seen how well it can perform in an 8-way config. Still, very encouraging early progress. Again, cannibalism from Intel's Xeon line shouldn't be a problem.
I also thought the SPECweb99 results were very encouraging, too, except that this is starting to become an outdated benchmark. Still, it's nice to see Itanium 2 performing well on older code.
IMO, Intel has performance in the bag with Itanium 2. The first generation of Itanium was disappointing, but not so this time. Early benchmark scores are more than convincing, and performance looks to be competitive with Power4, let alone the other competitors in this market. Intel's future with Itanium 2 is looking very bright, and HP's upside with this product is looking very good as well. Dell might have to rethink their position with Itanium 2, once sales start picking up due to the huge levels of price / performance that Itanium 2 can deliver on real software. I am very much looking forward to what the future will bring for Itanium 2, especially with Madison and Deerfield supposedly right around the corner.
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