Big Box Unix Brawl: HP beats IBM on TPC-C
According to Computer Business Review, Hewlett-Packard Co. has finally surpassed IBM Corp in taking over the top spot on the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark test. Timothy Prickett Morgan said HP worked hard to squeak by with its HP Superdome configured with 64 dual-core Montecito chips. IBM’s best result to date is on its System p5 595 configured with 32 dual-core Power5+ chips. Morgan expects HP’s dominance to be short-lived, assuming IBM’s Power6 doesn’t hit major delays.
Posted: March 8th, 2007 under Power and AIX, Itanium, RISC processors and HP-UX.
hmmm… so HP needs twice the amount of processor cores to beat IBM’s p-series. Now let’s assume I want to run a really big Oracle database on that Superdome. I will need to pay for 64 extra core licenses. Intel compensation factor = 0.5. Enterpris Edition license roughly $30,000 per core. So choosing the HP Superdome will cost me $30,000*0.5*64= $880.000 extra. And don’t forget the 22% annual support fee of $210,000.
I say IBM still wins. But hey, I sell the stuff so I must be biased.
Comment by Fedor Alema — June 6, 2007 @ 6:53 am