BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

Promises, promises & IBM

Thursday Feb 15, 2007

IBM POWER6 info in a CNET article.

The say, "The first Power6 systems, lower-end models, are due to arrive midway through 2007."

So in the mean time will IBM start publishing the benchmarks they've avoided on IBM p5 595 POWER5+ any time soon? Or is it just too embarrassing to show SPECjbb2005, SPECint_rate2006, etc. results compared to Sun 1.8GHz US-IV+ systems?

when do the high-end power6 systems start to show? ...late 2007 or 2008?

[4] Comments
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Posted at 07:07AM Feb 15, 2007 in Competitor Follies
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I've said it before and I'll say it again.

If you want to berate another company for not publishing a full set of benchmarks why don't you try presuading Sun to publish their missing benchmarks - ie. SpecFP. There are no SpecFP results for UltraSPARC-IV+ results listed on www.spec.org and the last UltraSPARC-IV result was March 2005.

So, why are Sun avoiding publishing FP benchmarks for UltraSPARC-IV+? Lousy performance perhaps?

Posted by Phillip Fayers on February 15, 2007 at 12:09 PM PST #

US-IV+ doesn't have fused mul-adds instruction, IBM does.

That (artificially?) helps a few scientific apps and SPECfp.

doesn't explain why IBM doesn't publish high-end commercial benchmarks that they used to publish on. ...Unless they are scared of Sun.

Posted by BM Seer on February 15, 2007 at 04:37 PM PST #

I understand that.

I know that the UltraSPARC-IV+ won't look wonderful on floating point benchmarks compared to Power (or Woodcrest, or Opteron or ...) but that doesn't explain why Sun doesn't publish high-end scientific benchmarks that they used to publish on. ...Unless they are scared of IBM.

Posted by Phillip Fayers on February 16, 2007 at 01:09 AM PST #

OK you are right, let's compare that to POWER5+ publications on SPECfp_rate2006... hey no POWER5+ publications on SPECfp_rate2006, SPECint_rate2006, SPECjbb2005, etc. reminder SPEC CPU 2000 no longer accepts submisssions.

Posted by BM Seer on February 17, 2007 at 02:02 PM PST #

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