The Intel Itanium 2 leapfrogging begins

IT'S BEEN A WHILE since we looked at Itanium 2 based systems available from the various vendors. Quite frankly, in the last 6 months or so there have been a number of eye-catching announcements that highlight the recent, rather remarkable performance progress of the Intel Itanium Processor Family (IPF) and these vendors.

Could this be the year of the Itanium gold rush?

The IPF family of 64-bit chips that was launched in 1998 with the unremarkable performance of the first Itanium is are now on to its third generation. The first was Merced running at 800MHz with an off-chip discrete cache. The second was McKinley released in June 2002 running at up to 1GHz with 3MB Level 3 on-die cache, 6 instructions/cycle and 6.4GB/s of bandwidth and performed, about 1.5-2 times faster than Merced. The third is Madison, due sometime in the latter half of 2003 running at a clock speed of 1.5GHz with up to 6MB Level 3 on-die cache and now helping a number of systems vendors yield impressive record performance results.

In September 2002, NEC announced their Itanium 2 NEC TX7 had achieved the best TPC-C on a non-clustered Microsoft Windows platform of 308,620 tpmC. Shortly thereafter, on October 17th, 2002, the Unisys ES7000 enterprise server delivered the best TPC-H performance ever recorded for a non-clustered 16-processor server in the benchmark's 300GB database category surpassing even IBM's 32-processor result!

Then on 12/12/02, NEC released a TPC-C beating its previous result with an NEC Express5800/1320Xc at 342,746 tpmC using Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition with SQL Server 2000 (EE), 64-bit.

But this wasn't enough. In April 2003, NEC announced their best result of 514,034 tpmC with the NEC Express5800/1320Xc again running Windows Server 2003 with SQL Server 2000 (EE), 64-bit. This result was the world's best performance for a non-clustered, 32-processor server until in April, the record breaking TPC-C results from the HP 64-way Superdome, leapfrogged NEC when HP, Microsoft and Intel achieved the world's highest-ever single-system TPC-C benchmark on a non-clustered 64-processor HP server based on Itanium 2 Madison, Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Data Center Edition and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit). The result of 658,277 transactions per minute (tpmC) exceeded the previous record, set by a 128-processor RISC system. But why this intense hullabaloo of benchmarking activity?

Mark Feverston, VP Servers at Unisys doesn't see the need to compete in the benchmarking race. "We are seeing the majority of commercial clients going with eight to 16 way systems. The huge 64-way and beyond systems will be more prevalent in high performance computing such as scientific and engineering uses. The main need we see is for database servers and business intelligence engines that can utilize the larger 64-bit real memory of our Itanium 2 servers."

Interesting perspective, but nobody had told the benchmarking jockeys, because on May 9 IBM achieved 680,613 tpmC (TPC-C) on a 32-way, RISC powered IBM eServer pSeries 690 Turbo 7040-681 running Power4+ (not Itanium 2) with DB2, AIX and Tuxedo, becoming king of the non-clustered hill.

But only for a short three weeks, before getting ousted May 20th by HP's 64-way SuperDome with 707,102 tpmC (TPC-C) on Windows Server 2003 with Microsoft SQL Server (64-bit).

So isn't this always the way a classic performance benchmark leapfrog race is won? Crowning and dethroning in quick succession, but wait! My crystal ball says that within a month we will see a new leader taking back the top spot from HP's Madison-powered Superdome.

Unisys' Mark Feverston points out that the benchmarks are like "Lab experiments and PR moves."

With the real performance and power of Itanium 2 becoming evident in the last few months, I declare that the "PR moves" are now officially under way to woo customers to Itanium 2 servers!

Vendor	Server	Throughput tpmC	Price/Performance $/tpmC	Operating System	Database	CPU	Shipment
HP	64-way Superdome	707,102	$9.13 per tpmC	MS Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition	Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Ed 64-bit	Intel Itanium 2 6M (Madison)	8/2003
IBM	4-way x450	NA	NA	NA	NA	Intel Itanium 2 McKinley	Now
NEC	32-way NEC Express5800/1320Xc Server	514,034.72	$11.50 per tpmC	MS Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition 64	Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Ed 64-bit	Intel Itanium 2 6M (Madison)	22/10/2003
SGI	SGI 3000 Altix	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA	Now
Unisys	ES7000	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA	Now

Comparing the vendors' top performing Itanium2 server results using TPC-C
Source: Vendors, TPC.org. For more details please go to www.tpc.org

Feisal Mosleh is at Juldee, a strategic consulting firm. Juldee has a practice dedicated to helping enterprises qualify needs, assess solutions and optimize their payback from enterprise server deployment

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