BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

IBM Power6 pricing - cores configured in systems are very expensive

Friday Apr 25, 2008

IBM finally let the truth out about their $70K/core pricing - and it is just as I said. Now you can do your own $/perf analysis. IBM has posted real prices publicly on the web. I've included those links and a summary of the cost breakdown for those expensive cores.

IBM p570 4-core 64GB Memory(667MHz) = $287K or $71K/core

  • $50.9K for base system (chassis, 2-sas disks, two 1600w power supplies, IO, ethernet, etc.) = $50.9K
  • $115.0K for 4-core of 4.7GHz CPUs (note: you have to buy the CPUs and then pay for activation: part#7380 4.7GHZ POWER6-2/0CORE 12 DDR2 2x$11,500, part#5403 ONE PROC (1-core) Activation fee FOR FC#7380 is 4x$23,000)
  • $121.2 for 64GB of 667MHz memory (note: you have to buy the memory and then pay for activation: part#5694 0/8GB DDR2 Memory(4X2GB) DIMMs - 8*$3,035, part#5680 Activation of 1GB DDR2 POWER6 64*$1,515)

IBM p570 8-core 128GB Memory(667MHz) = $553.8K or $69k/core

  • $81.4K base system (chassis, 2-sas disks, two 1600w power supplies, IO, ethernet, etc.)
  • $230.0K for 8-core of 4.7GHz CPUs (note: you have to buy the CPUs and then pay for activation: part#7380 4.7GHZ POWER6-2/0CORE 12 DDR2 4x$11,500, part#5403 1-core Activation fee FOR FC#7380 is 8x$23,000)
  • $242.4k for 128GB of 667MHz memory (note: you have to buy the memory and then pay for activation: part#5694 0/8GB DDR2 Memory(4X2GB) DIMMs - 16*$3,035, part#5680 Activation of 1GB DDR2 POWER6 128*$1,515)

IBM's official public links, found by Googling:

IBM p570 power6 4.7GHz pricing:
http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/8/897/ENUS107-288/ENUS107288.PDF

IBM p595 power6 5.0GHz pricing:
http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/7/897/ENUS108-257/index.html

OK, Its very very late now, so I don't have time to post the 4.2GHz and slower memory, but it really doesn't change the price story that much, anyway you can go to the links and find it yourself.

[5] Comments
Like this post? del.icio.us | furl | slashdot | technorati | digg
Posted at 05:04PM Apr 25, 2008 in Competitor Follies
Tags:
Comments:

so you dont think that either of those specifications are actually more akin to the entry class P6-520 or P6-550 ??

And presumably your not taking into account that the prices quoted are very probably list price.

Posted by Alex on April 26, 2008 at 10:09 AM PDT #

That the Sun Niagara servers are cheaper and faster than Power is no news anymore. Everybody knows it. But people are often complaining that x64 is cheaper. So why don' t you publish some benchmarks with DB2 or Websphere? The software is charged on a per-socket-basis. In that scenario, the Niagara lineup would even be cheaper than x64. IBM charges 30000 to 100000$ per socket for their software. The result can be seen at the Lotus benchmark. Niagara has the lowest price per user.

Posted by Arthur on April 28, 2008 at 05:51 AM PDT #

Yes, these are list prices. They are very expensive per core - so the notion of per-core-performance is very misleading.

I often find that X64 competitors play the other game by only comparing small memory configurations to the UltraSPARC T2.

Posted by BM Seer on April 28, 2008 at 10:27 AM PDT #

Ok, so these list prices are not the actual prices , which could well be some 40-50% lower.

Posted by Alex on April 29, 2008 at 01:18 AM PDT #

Sure these are list prices, compare to other's list prices. Still if discounts are applied to all systems, it doesn't get around the fact that IBM charges a WHOLE LOT PER CORE!

The whole industry knows there are discounts and everyone applies them to about the same level. But for comparisons everything is based on list price for a level playing field.

Same thing for software pricing, there are discounts also, but again the basis is list prices.

Posted by BM Seer on April 29, 2008 at 10:03 AM PDT #

Post a Comment:
Comments are closed for this entry.