Perhaps most significantly, IBM is offering the 1.7GHz Power4+ prices at the same price as the 1.5GHz version it put into the pSeries 655 in May 2003.

The pSeries 655 is an eight-way capable machine that has a single multichip module (MCM) with four dual-core Power4+ engines. Customers can activate half the cores on each chip to make what looks like a four-way SMP server to AIX, IBM’s Unix variant, or activate all the cores to make an eight-way box.

Either way, each pair of Power4 cores on a single chip inside the MCM has a shared L2 cache that is 1.5MB in size. For workloads that are more L2 cache sensitive, only activating four Power cores per server is a better option since each core gets its own 1.5MB cache to play with.

In May 2003, the pSeries 655 was available in two configurations: a four-way using 1.7GHz Power4+ chips or an eight-way using 1.5GHz Power4+ processors.

With today’s announcement, IBM is offering an eight-way pSeries 655 with 1.7GHz Power4+ processors, 4GB of main memory, and two 36GB disks for the same $70,000 it was charging up until now for an eight-way using the 1.5GHz Power4+.

In addition to the processor changes, IBM has also expanded the maximum main memory capacity of the pSeries 655 from 32GB to 64GB.

The high-end 32-way pSeries 690 is the only other machine that currently has the 1.7GHz Power4+ chips. The 16-way pSeries 670 is still using 1.5GHz processors.

The question many IBM customers want to have an answer to is when Big Blue is going to get around to shipping an even faster Power4+ chip, perhaps hitting 2GHz or higher.

There has been plenty of speculation and rumor about such a thing, and IBM wants to keep pace with the benchmarks that rival Hewlett Packard has been showing with its 64-way 1.5GHz Madison Itanium 2-based Integrity line of servers, which are also known as Superdomes.

In November 2003, HP broke through the 1 million transaction per minute (TPM) barrier on the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark using a 64-way Superdome running HP-UX 11i and Oracle 10g Enterprise Edition. Specifically, this machine processed 1,008,145 TPM at a cost of $8.33 per TPM after a staggering 48% discount on hardware, software, and maintenance over a three-year term.

IBM has fallen way behind on this in terms of aggregate performance, but still benefits because in a CPU-based pricing world, a Power4 core still does almost twice as much work (at least as far as TPC-C is concerned) as a Madison chip in the Superdome.

If IBM boosts main memory on the machines to 1TB, as HP did with the Superdomes, it could push performance on the TPC-C benchmark well above 1 million TPM. If IBM can get to 2.1GHz or higher, tune Oracle 10g a bit more, it could even go a bit higher than 1 million TPM and it might even be able to get the bang for the buck down to $7.50 per TPM or so.

This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire