HP beat IBM at its own game

It is kind of funny. IBM piled up $1.827 million dollars , with a eServer xSeries 366 machine with 4 Xeon MP 7040 dual core CPUs, it achieved a TPC-C score of 221,017 tpmC. IBM was using IBM's DB2 UDB 8.2 and Windows x64. HP had a $0.48 million DL585 machine with 4 Opteron 880 dual core CPUs, the score was 202,551. HP was using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (64bit).

Today, I stumbled onto this new TPC-C report by HP submitted on Dec 5, 2005. It's again the same DL585 with 4 Opteron 880s, the cost is $0.47 million, but with a TPC-C score of 236,054 tpmC. This beats the $1.827 million IBM xSeries 366 by 6.8% in TPC-C performance.

The difference? HP was using IBM DB2 UDB v8.2 in the new TPC-C test!

I think HP is smart, they don't have any religion. Unlike SUN, which always uses its own compiler and Solaris 10 in tests, HP choose whatever fastest.

By the way, the $1.8 million IBM Xeon machine won't be available until March 31, 2006, one day before April fool's day. The HP DL585 had been available since December 5, 2005.