BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

IBM avoiding system comparison

Thursday Feb 26, 2009

I'm seeing more articles from IBM trying to get customers too look at wrong things! Shame, Shame.

What customers would like to know about CMT vs IBM POWER6:

  • How does system performance compare?
  • How much do IBM's 16-thread/core systems cost? (answer: $1,000,000)
  • What is the system $/Perf?
  • What is the measured watts on benchmarks?
What you have to believe in order to read IBM's new Power6 vs. CMT architectural papers. Hard to believe any well-trained computer architect would make any of these mistakes.
  • Comparing per-thread or per-core performance is more important than system performance.
  • Hardware threads all cost the same (server price divided by number of threads).
  • IBM power6 16-core system costs the same as T5440?!?
  • Single-thread performance is the most important aspect of a medium or large system with 128threads (example: IBM p595 has 128 threads).

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Posted at 07:00AM Feb 26, 2009 in IBM Follies
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But still IBM continue to do well and Sun continue to flounder.

Posted by Investa Ixnotsun on March 02, 2009 at 12:51 AM PST #

Investa Ixnotsun: huh ? Sun's Niagara line is up 31% in calendar Q4. IBM's System p series is essentially flat. For once the market is rational :-)

Posted by JTB on March 03, 2009 at 09:48 PM PST #

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