BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

IBM Power6 - carefully read the fine print

Friday Jun 01, 2007

A new low. IBM has to do a huge amount of questionable math to try to make the POWER6 look good. You now have to go to IBM's website to see their press release, as it seems it is very different than the one on launch date. http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/21580.wss

But the bottom line is IBM uses totally bogus reasoning to try to make POWER6 look good in comparison to Sun. IBM says Sun has lower utilisation so you need to derate Sun systems by a bogus factor of THREE! Bull!

I've already posted last year http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/the_total_tyranny_of_low which stated "a significant number of Sun's large servers run at over 80% utilisation", and then also quoted Computerworld which stated, "Dennis Callahan, CIO at The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America in New York, server utilization has shot up to nearly 50% in the past 18 months, with a goal in coming years of nearly 70%.

OK, on to the footnote with so much bull it stinks up the whole IBM press release. It really makes one understand that IBM really is on shaky ground with the POWER6, expensive, not that fast, and very slowly being released as we've covered in many posts since the IBM POWER6 launch. By the way I still have NOT seen system configuration, GHz, memory size and all details for the POWER6 "published wattage."

    (3) This calculation is based on the trend toward consolidation of existing installed systems. Performance comparisons of the system were based on available benchmarks using the Java-based SPECjbb2005 benchmark (results as of 5/22/07: System p 570 (16-core, 8 chips, 2 chips per core, 4.7 GHz) SPECjbb2005 691,975 bops, 86497 bops/JVM; Sun Fire v890 (16-core, 8 chips, 2 chips per core) 1.5 GHz, SPECjbb2005 117,986 bops, 29,497 bops/JVM). A conservative 5 to 1 performance comparison was used. System utilization levels were derived from studies conducted by IBM of currently installed base of UNIX systems (available at www.ibm.com/servers/library/pdf/scorpion.pdf) and the recent trend on System p for utilizations levels well over 60% using advance virtualization technologies. 20% was used for the currently installed base of Sun Fire v890 systems and 60% for a virtualized System p 570. Higher utilization levels provide a 3 to 1 consolidation factor. Power consumption figures of 5600 W for the IBM System p 570 and 3200 W for the Sun Fire v890 were based on the maximum rates published by IBM and Sun Microsystems, respectively. Air conditioning power requirement estimated at 50% of system power requirement. Energy cost of $.092 per kWh is based on 2007 YTD US Average Retail price to commercial customers per US DOE at http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_b.html as of 5/18/2007. For space calculations, two IBM System p 570 servers will fit in a single, standard rack. Assumed rates were 60% for IBM System p 570 and 20% for Sun Fire v890.

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Posted at 07:35AM Jun 01, 2007 in IBM Follies
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yes, they played fast and loose with the utilization rates, assuming that 30 sun boxes are only at 20% while the two ibm boxes are at 60+%. But the real trick was to use a v890, which is about as bad as it gets when it comes to power, performance and space. From reading the pres release, IBM has a 4.7GHz server with 8 cpu's or 16 cores, it consums 5600W and takes up 21 rack units of space. Now lets start to run the numbers using SPECjbb2005 as the benchmark: IBM has claimed a system with a total throughput of SPECjbb2005 691,975 bops, 86497 bops/JVM, 43,284bops/core or 123bops/Watt. Not bad. The per core numbers are rather impressive, with the best sun published benchmarks being 19,045/core on an x4100 w/ 2x256 cpu's. An x4200 w/ 2x285 cpu's post a result of 12,274 per core. But given that it consums about 350W, that would put it at 140bops/Watt, about 15% better than IBM's latest. Now, lets look at a beter system for jvm's: the T2000. Published results show 74365 for a T2000. A total of 371bops/W. Thus, in that same rack we can fit 21 of these boxes (1,561,665bops/rack) for a total power draw of only 4200W, or less than a single p570 server. So the sun solution provides a touch more performance at less than half of the power draw than IBM's latest and greatest. So, yes, the p570 has the fastest bops/core out there. But when it comes to bops/W, the T2000 kicks its by 3x.

Posted by john on June 01, 2007 at 10:30 AM PDT #

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