IBM's POWER 5 Benchmarks leap ahead of competition

[dolphin842]

Hopefully IBM will keep whatever is making these POWER 5 chips so fast when they start producing the PowerPC derivatives for Apple machines.

IBM, Moore's Law and the POWER 5 chip

"IBM's recent pSeries benchmark ought to raise a good number of eyebrows. Unix server benchmarks had previously been a game of leapfrog between IBM and HP, with IBM looking increasingly strong in the last round (in 2003) when its p690 server with 32 processors demonstrated a slightly higher transaction rate than HP's 64 processor Itanium 2 server. The latest benchmark from IBM leaves both previous benchmarks in dust. In the TPC-C benchmark, IBM demonstrated over 3m transactions per minute (tpmC) almost three times more than the previous highest result of 1.2tpmC, posting a 37 per cent price performance advantage in the process. Never in the history of the benchmarking of servers (or databases) has any company demonstrated such a dramatic lead over the competition. [...] While chip performance may have doubled every 18 months in the past, system performance has not and IBM has now delivered almost a tripling of system performance. That is what the benchmark indicates."

Granted this benchmark measures something specific, and the POWER 5 certainly is tuned for a different application, but its performance certainly bodes well for future Apple processors, couldn't one speculate?

[stevehaslip]

holy *****! 37% faster than the last one. well it looks good for the future.

[mj_1903]

Remember, that entire test was optimised from top to bottom just for that task.

On the other hand, those Power5 processors are true monsters, so it is not surprising that they annihilated the previous best.