IBM said on Thursday its workhorse commercial computers have smashed the industry"s most demanding tests, which analysts said creates a performance gap that could put further pressure on Hewlett-Packard or Sun Microsystems to recalibrate their strategies. International Business Machines Corp. executives told a meeting of industry analysts in Austin, Texas, that IBM"s Unix eServer 595 computer running on IBM"s own Power 5 line of computer chips has set a new database-processing record that surpasses by nearly three times the previous performance record set by HP for its heavy-duty Superdome computers.
The Armonk, New York-based company said that in industry-recognized tests that corporate decision-makers use to choose their computers for running databases, operations and research, IBM has demonstrated what could stretch into a multiyear lead in price and performance in the Unix market. "It wasn"t an incremental leap ahead. It was really a pole vault over the competition," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT market research in Hayward, California. Chief information officers, also known as CIOs, and other corporate buyers count on independent tests to measure the performance of computers from rival vendors in real-life business conditions.