* IBM's latest servers use gaming consoles technology to soup up performance
IBM last week launched two monster servers, the IBM System p5 590 and the 595, a 64-core machine capable of processing 4 million transactions a minute.
Faster than HP’s Superdome, according to IBM’s claims, the p5 595 running a single instance of IBM DB2 9 on AIX and connected to the IBM System Storage DS4800, processed 4,016,222 transactions per minute on the TPC-C (Transaction Performance Council) benchmark.
The servers use IBM’s Virtualization Engine and are able to be partitioned into 10 virtual servers per processor core, allowing customers to consolidate multiple servers and applications into a single box.
“The latest System p5 offerings are powerful systems with a lot to offer large organizations beyond simple benchmark bragging rights as they feature some of the most granular virtualization capabilities available today,” says Clay Ryder, senior analyst for the Sageza Group.
They also use IBM’s Dual Stress technology, adapted from gaming consoles, to stretch and compress the silicon and deliver increased system performance and more efficient power consumption. Using Dual Stress technology, IBM clams a 24% increase in transistor speed.
“The Dual Stress process is interesting in that it illustrates the building-a-better-mouse-trap approach available to systems vendors that develop their own processor technologies,” says Ryder. “By maintaining a sizable investment in microchip design and manufacturing, IBM has been able to raise the bar on transistor performance while simultaneously improving energy efficiency and hence lower heat generation.”
Each server is built from 16-core units that IBM calls ‘books’ – each book contains two eight-core multi-chip modules containing four dual-core Power5+ processors. The processors on the p5 595 run at 2.3 GHz or 2.1 GHz, while the p5-590 runs at 2.1 GHz.
The p5 590 is the smaller of the two servers, topping out at 32-cores. Each processor in the 590 and 595 has 1.9MB of Level 2 caches and 36MB of L3 cache.
The p5 590 and 595 support AIX 5L V5.2 and V5.3, Novell’s SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server AS 4.
The p5 590 with eight cores starts at $422,000. The p5 595 with 16 cores starts at $778,000. The machines are expected to be available on Aug. 11.
