IBM eServer Crushes Sun to Set Transaction Processing Record; New 24-way p680 Outperforms More Expensive Sun 64-way E10000 by 40 percent

Business Wire, Oct 16, 2000

Business Editors and High-Tech Writers

SOMERS, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 16, 2000

IBM today announced that its new IBM eServer(a) pSeries 680 server using 24 of IBM's breakthrough Silicon-on-Insulator microprocessors has set a new world record for processing power.

The p680 outperformed a more expensive Sun E10000 with 64 processors by more than 40 percent to become the world's most powerful single system for transaction processing.

The p680's record-setting performance was achieved on the independent TPC-C benchmark. The pSeries 680 also proved to be the best value among the large enterprise servers tested with the lowest cost per transaction. The p680 performed 220,807.27 transactions per minute (tpmC) at $43.30 per transaction ($/tpmC), achieving better performance for the dollar than both the Sun E10000 and Hewlett-Packard V2500.

"The performance of the p680 surpasses the performance of Sun's E10000 equipped with nearly three times as many processors," said Mike Kerr, vice president, IBM Web Servers. "We've put the p680 up against the best the competition has to offer on the industry's toughest benchmarks and the results are clear. The p680 offers the world's best transaction processing performance and does it for less than the competition."

The p680 is the first commercial UNIX server to feature chips with Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) technology. SOI pushes chip performance at least a year ahead of the competition by using silicon technology to boost speed with performance gains up to 30 percent over conventional bulk silicon technology.

           Details on the p680's Record Setting Performance


System              pSeries 680               Sun Enterprise 10000(aa)

Processors               24                            64

Database         Oracle8i(TM) Enterprise        Sybase Adaptive Server
                Edition Release 3 (8.1.7)        Enterprise 12.0.0.2
                        64-bit

Operating System     AIX 4.3.3                      Sun Solaris 7

Other Software   Websphere Application Server       BEA Tuxedo 6.3
                     Enterprise Edition
                       Version 3.0

tpmC                   220,807.27                    156,873.03

$/tpmC                  $43.30                         $48.81

      (aa) as published on http://www.tpc.org

About the IBM eServer pSeries 680

The IBM eServer pSeries 680 is IBM's most powerful UNIX symmetric multiprocessor system. It excels at many diverse e-business applications, including Web serving and hosting, mission-critical Enterprise Resource Planning, Supply Chain Management, transaction processing and Business Intelligence. The p680 builds on the award-winning design of its companion, the IBM RS/6000(R) Model S80, increasing the clock speed to 600 MHz and memory to 96GB. The server is powered by advanced IBM Silicon-on-Insulator microprocessors and is available with new mainframe-inspired features including Capacity Upgrade on Demand to enable businesses to cost effectively keep pace with rapid growth. For more information about the IBM eServer line, visit http://www.ibm.com/eserver.> IBM, the e-business logo, RS/6000, pSeries and AIX are registered

trademarks or trademarks of the International Business

Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or

both.

(a) The IBM eServer brand consists of the established IBM

e-business logo with the descriptive term "server" following

it.

UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other

countries, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company,

Limited.

tpmC, $/tpmC and TPC-C are trademarks of the Transaction

Performance Processing Council (TPC). For more information,

visit the TPC Web site at http://www.tpc.org.

This document was created on October 16, 2000. The data contained

herein was accurate at the time of creation. IBM recognizes

that newer data may be published after this date that would

cause this data to become inaccurate.

Other company, product and service names, which may be denoted by

a double-a (aa) may be trademarks or service marks of others.