As you might expect, Hewlett-Packard Co is the first out the door to show the performance advantages of the Madison chips with 9MB of L3 cache. Last week, HP posted a TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark test result that showed a four-way rx4640 with four of the 1.6GHz chips, 128GB of main memory, and 19.2TB of storage could crank through 161,217 transactions per minute at a cost of $3.94 per TPM.

This machine ran Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 3 AS (Update 3, to be specific) and Oracle’s 10g Standard Edition database.

A year ago, HP tested a similar four-way server, the rx5760, running Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 using the 1.5GHz/6MB Madisons. That machine was able to crank though 121,065 TPM at a cost of $4.49 per TPM.

Linux performance, if Linux has been tested on the rx5670, would have probably been in the same ballpark. However, that rx5670 was only configured with 64GB of main memory, and the 128GB of main memory used on the rx4640 test might have been as big a factor in the performance boost with the new Itaniums as was the minutely higher clock speed and the much larger L3 cache memory on the Madison 9MB chips.

Middleware maker BEA Systems and HP have tested a two-node cluster running the SPECjAppServer2002 Java application server benchmark, and have attained the highest performance and best performance to date on this test. The database server behind the test was an rx4640 using the 1.5GHz/6 MB cache Itanium 2s with 8 GB of main memory and equipped with the HP-UX 11i v2 implementation of HP’s own Unix.

The Java application server was a similar rx4640 machine running Red Hat Linux Enterprise 3 Update 1 and BEA’s WebLogic Server 8.1. This setup was able to handle 1,575 total operations per second (TOPS) at a cost of $199 per TOPS, giving it the highest performance of a four-way machine and the lowest price, too.

It is a bit of a mystery why HP and BEA didn’t show off the rx4640 using the new Itanium processors, because they surely knew that the new chips were being announced. If they had done that, they could have showed as much as 30% better performance on a machine with the same price.