THE INTEL Itanium has started to pick up some serious speed. Chipzilla is making merry over the fact that an HP Itanium 2 Madison running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and SQL Server 2000 64bit edition has jumped into pole position for the TPC-C benchmark for a non-clustered system.
TPC-C is pretty much an industry standard benchmark. It"s all about handling transaction processing for orders. The results that have been posted for the new system are fairly hefty to say the least at 658,277 transactions per minute (tpmC). The benchmark was running on a 64-way non-clustered HP server.
HP is not the only one to be squeezing ultra fast performance out of the new Madison chip. NEC just announced a TPC-C of 514,034.72 tpmC on a 32-way system. According to Intel, that"s makes it the fastest 32 processor non-clustered system. Another feather in Itanium"s cap. Especially as the NEC system managed a very respectable price/performance result of $11.50/tpmC.
You can compare the figures with other machines at the TPC website here. (No f00! Not here! Below!)
There can be no doubt that pushing the Itanium"s internal cache up to 6MB has had a profound effect on its performance. The processor is starting to really shift. It seems only fair to wonder if the Itanium"s 64bit competitors will follow suit with the huge caches to get bigger performance.