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Some IBM POWER6 actual prices and why per-core-performance doesn't say much

Friday Nov 30, 2007

Here are some quick IBM POWER6 prices that have been quoted to a customer!
IBM p570 POWER6 4.7GHz 4-core, 32GB $252K USD
IBM p570 POWER6 4.7GHz 4-core, 64GB $313K USD
...it would be so much easier if IBM just posted their prices on these small servers.

I'll have to check how these compare to TPC-C pricing at some point... http://www.tpc.org/results/individual_results/IBM/IBM_570_10000GB_20071015_ES.pdf

Also how does that compare to 2-socket Quad-core Opteron, 2-socket Quad-core Xeon, or the 1 chip 8-core UltraSPARC T2 all with reasonable amount of memory.

Clearly you can't just say "best 4-core" or "best 8-core" in performance and hide prices without being rotten to the core

...ready, steady, go. ...to the weekend.

[4] Comments

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Posted at 03:53PM Nov 30, 2007 in IBM Follies
Tags: ibm power6

Comments:

Here I found you some list prices on the web. I copied this from ibm.com just now. Looks to me like you can buy four POWER6 cores for about $1,500 each. When you buy those 4 cores, the price includes all the other hardware (ie 4GB memory, etc.) and virtualization functionality in a JS22 blade.

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$6,129.00 (IBM US list price)*

2-socket, 4-core 4.0 GHz POWER6 BladeCenter JS22 Express blade server including 4GB of 667 MHz memory, one 73.4GB SAS disk drive, built-in virtualization (APV) and integrated dual Gigabit Ethernet ports.
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http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/js22e/browse.html

Posted by 67.158.178.125 on December 01, 2007 at 12:21 PM PST #

Note that an IBM p570 Power6 CANNOT be compared to Power6 in JS22 Blade. The JS22 Blade doesn't use the same Power6 chip as the p570. Theres no L3 cache on the Power6 in JS22, AND its lower GHZ and its roughly 44% slower (based on SPECint_rate). Also, the JS22 blade is a very limiting blade. Clearly IBM had to shoehorn this power hungry chip into this condense form factor... Only 4 dimm slots (you need very expensive 8GB dimms to go to a limiting 32GB MAX config). Note that the Sun Blade T6320 have 16 dimm slots and can support up to 64GB now (when 8GB dimms are supported -its expected to support up to 128GB!!), only supports ONE hard drive and its not even hot swappable! With 16GB on the JS22 blade, and don't forget the AIX licensing ($85/core) and required AIX-SW maintenance (3YR is $3228), and it quickly skyrockets from a $6K configuration to almost $20K and for 32GB of RAM, which is quite usual these days, its almost $40K. And this is just for the blade!! An equivalently configured T6320 is roughly half this price.. So we are back to about $10K/core for the blade version...

Posted by Phil on December 03, 2007 at 12:56 AM PST #

Phil, very good points. This posting is about IBM p570 benchmarks and costs on in terms of high GHz reasonable sized memory. IBM only benchmarks p570 Power6 on 4.7GHz.

Posted by BM Seer on December 03, 2007 at 03:19 PM PST #

And at the end the JS22 is a kludged design. I´ve summarized my concerns at http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/3700-Kludged-Design.html

Posted by Joerg M. on December 04, 2007 at 09:50 PM PST #