BM Seer Unofficial thoughts from an anonymous Sun employee

Yet again, Sun UltraSPARC IV+ beats IBM POWER5+

Wednesday Dec 13, 2006

Sun Fire E6900 UltraSPARC IV+ beats the IBM p5 570 POWER5+ on SPECjbb2005. Why haven't we seen any more POWER5+ performance benchmarks on workloads like this? Might be the weaknesses we've been talking about when looking at other benchmarks?

The Sun Fire E6900 with US-IV+ maintained price/performance leadership on the SPECjbb2005 server-side Java benchmark. The 16-way Sun Fire E6900 (32 Procs Avail to Java) with 1.8GHz US-IV+ processors outperformed the 16-way IBM P5 570 (32 Procs Avail to Java) with 2.2 GHz POWER5+ processors by 5%.

SPECjbb2005 Performance Chart (ordered by performance, bops: SPECjbb2005 Business Operations per Second, where bigger is better)
Ch/Co/Thr: Chips, Cores, Threads

System Processors Performance
Ch/Co/Thr GHz Type bops JVMs bops/JVM
SGI Altix 4700 16/32/32 1.6 Itanium 2 471,030 8 58,879
SGI Altix 3700 32/32/32 1.6 Itanium 2 457,598 16 28,600
Fujitsu PP1500 32/32/32 2.16 SPARC64 V 361,920 8 45,161
Sun Fire E6900 16/32/32 1.8 US-IV+ 343,512 16 21,470
Sun Fire E6900 24/48/48 1.5 US-IV+ 342,578 12 28,548
IBM p5-570 8/16/32 2.2 POWER5+ 326,651 8 40,831
Fujitsu PQ480 32/32/32 1.6 Itanium 2 322,719 8 40,340
Fujitsu PQ480 32/32/32 1.6 Itanium 2 295,161 1 295,161
Sun Fire E6900 16/32/32 1.5 US-IV+ 248,075 8 31,009
IBM p5-570 8/16/32 1.9 POWER5 244,361 8 30,545
Sun Fire E6900 16/32/32 1.5 US-IV+ 241,560 8 30,195
IBM p5-560Q 8/16/32 1.5 POWER5+ 226,291 8 28,286
IBM p5-570 8/16/32 1.9 POWER5 224,200 1 224,200

Complete benchmark results may be found at the SPEC benchmark website http://www.spec.org.

SPECjbb2005 (Java Business Benchmark) measures the performance of a Java implemented application tier (server-side Java). The benchmark is based on the order processing in a wholesale supplier application. The performance of the user tier and the database tier are not measured in this test. The metrics given are number of SPECjbb2005 bops (Business Operations per Second) and SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM (bops per JVM instance).

Results Summary
Certified Results
Performance: 343,512 SPECjbb2005 bops
  24,470 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM
Reference Date: December 6, 2006
Systems: Sun Fire E6900
Total # Processors: 16
Processor/GHz: US-IV+ 1.8 GHz
Operating System: Solaris 10
JVM: Java HotSpot(TM) 32-Bit, Version 1.6.0

Disclosure Statement:

    SPECjbb2005 Sun Fire E6900 (16-way, 16 chips, 32 cores, 1.8 GHz) 343,512 SPECjbb2005 bops, 21,470 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM submitted for review, IBM eServer p5 570 (8 chips, 16 cores, 16-way, 2.2 GHz) 326,651 SPECjbb2005 bops, 20,415 SPECjbb2005 bops/JVM. SPEC, SPECjbb reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results as of 12/06/06 on www.spec.org. Prices based on publicly documented list prices. SPECjbb2005 Benchmark Reports

[5] Comments
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Posted at 07:00AM Dec 13, 2006 in Benchmarks
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If you compare the bops/jvm column, it looks like both Power5 and the Itanium came out on top. I also don't see a $ amount per bops, which would be a more telling factor. What I would really like to see is a benchmark with a Sparc IV against a Intel arch. box running jrocket. That is the market you need to win at.

Posted by Steve on December 13, 2006 at 08:05 AM PST #

Itanic is dead, no one is buying, no one is porting, check any independent source. Sorry Itanic is a lost cause -- kinda like when Alpha was showing performance at the end, but others were winning. Xeon is where the action is for Intel.

Sun continues to growth, 3Qtrs now and is taking share from HP, Dell, IBM.

Posted by BM Seer on December 13, 2006 at 10:35 AM PST #

Itanic (Itanium 2) is also 2x larger and 3.4x more costly than the Sun Fire T2000 -- I won't even get into the huge power drain of Itanium 2. See the other posting today for details. Doubling cores won't help any of this much.

Posted by BM Seer on December 13, 2006 at 11:10 AM PST #

Where is IBM's vaunted p5-595 on this benchmark? I see big iron results from Sun, HP, Fujitsu, and SGI. But no IBM. The biggest box IBM has run this benchmark on is their midrange p5-570.

Posted by Mark on December 13, 2006 at 02:38 PM PST #

Come to think of it, where is IBM's POWER5 on the new SPECcpu2006 benchmark? I see Intel Pentium/Xeon, Intel Core Duo/Woodcrest, Intel Itanium, AMD Opteron, and Sun UltraSPARC, but not IBM.

Posted by Mark on December 13, 2006 at 02:48 PM PST #

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