As promised IBM released the results of its TPC-A and TPC-B benchmarks from the Transaction Processing Performance Council for its RS/6000 line at UniForum, claiming significant price-performance advantages over Hewlett-Packard Co, so far the only other Unix vendor to release the figures. The RS/6000 Model 520 acheived 17 transactions per second, or $20,600/TPS, while the Model 550 reached 33 transactions per second, or $20,400/TPS. The Hewlett-Packard HP 9000 842S and 852S machines clocked at 33 and 43.3 TPS respectively, but the TPS per dollar ratings were higher, at $25,400 and $23,900. Both machines beat IBM AS/400 and DEC VAX/VMS ratings. One reason why other vendors have not yet declared is the considerable work and expense involved in running the benchmarks. TPC-A replaces the old debit-credit benchmark and measures multi-user transaction processing, while the less complex TPC-B replaces the TP1 benchmark, representing a multi-tasking database application. IBM’s TPC-B figures are 28.7 TPS ($3,300/TPS) for the 320 and 58.2 TPS ($4,800/TPS) for the 550, beating ratings from Hewlett and Sun Microsystems.
