The ZDNet article P570 vs. T5220 takes up the attempt to resolve the question of superiority concerning the price performance of the IBM p550 versus the Sun Fire T5440. Paul Murphy notes that Jesper Frimann has given the nod to the p550, given that it supports shared pool virtualization and, hence, should allow for much higher utilization.

Murphy counters, noting that while the Power6 is a very nice processor that he often recommends as an alternative to Itanium, the absence of auditable benchmarks run against SPARC or higher-end Opteron and Nehalem gear makes this difficult.

He does, however, cite one benchmark, a SPECjAppServer 2004 result featuring the Apache-based Websphere with J2EE and DB2 under IBM AIX 5L v5.3. Here, he observes, the p570 and the p550 produced a score of 1,197.51 SPECjAppServer2004 JOPS@Standard.

Further, Murphy notes that Sun gets the price performance advantage in that it has a six-times performance advantage per dollar if one could buy the p570 and get the p550 along with the disk free.

Murphy also observes that, using the TPC/C benchmark data that Sun has long considered obsolete, IBM contends that the cost of just the four licensed cores in the P570 used as the J2EE server is 1.6 times the nominal list price of the two Sun servers combined: delivered, set-up, and fully warranted for three years. "Because the Sun combo is also rather a lot faster, the real bottom line here is that only a truly committed IBMer would ever buy a p550/570 combination for something a T2 will do," Murphy concludes.

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