IBM claims floating-point speed record

By Stephen Withers
Monday, 03 September 2007 03:28

Home IT

IBM's new System p 570 server has set new records under the SPECfp_2006 and per-core SPECfp_rate2006 floating-point benchmarks.

"The System p 570 running the POWER6 microprocessor was designed from the ground up to be a balanced system, with massive bandwidth to accommodate the machine's incredible speed," said Scott Handy, vice president of worldwide marketing for System p servers at IBM. "These benchmark results indicate the kind of performance that will help enable customers to create the efficient data centers of the future."

A single core of a 4.7 GHz POWER6 processor in an System p 570 server running SUSE Linux scored 22.4 in the SPECfp_2006 benchmark.

In the SPECfp_rate2006 benchmark, a four core System p 570 server running AIX scored 115, an eight core configuration with the same OS scored 213, and a 16 core model running Linux scored 428. IBM does not appear to be claiming the eight core result as a class record.

The SPECfp_2006 is a measure of how quickly a system can complete a single task, while SPECfp_rate2006 measures the rate at which a computer can complete a number of tasks in a given amount of time. Both are concerned with floating-point performance, and are written in C, C++ and Fortran. Most of the tasks are drawn from the scientific and technical domains.