IBM has responded to Intel’s recent announcement of Montecito dual-core Itaniums by firing up a new generation of Unix servers based on its own Power5+ processors, including the fastest machine in the world according to some transaction processing benchmarks.

The upgrades affect the System p line – formerly known as the pSeries and perhaps still best known by the older RS/6000 naming convention – that runs IBM’s AIX version of Unix, as well as Red Hat and Suse Linux distributions.

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) record-breaking server is the System p5 595, which packs 64 cores based on dual-core Power5+ chips running at 2.3GHz or 2.1GHz. Each dual-core processor has a huge 36MB of level 3 cache memory.

IBM will also offer a 32-core sister product, the p5 590, limited to the 2.1GHz clock speed.

The IT giant said speed improvements are partly due to Dual Stress, a silicon manufacturing process developed for games chips.

“[Dual Stress] solves a fundamental conundrum of physics that had vexed processor designers since the dawn of the semiconductor industry,” said IBM. “The breakthrough process is designed to result in up to a 24 percent transistor speed increase, at the same power levels, compared to similar transistors produced without the technology. Dual Stress can also be used to lower power consumption.”
Also new on the System p is Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager software to measure usage costs in a way suitable for accounts departments. Data can be split by business unit, division, project or other grouping to analyse usage and spending patterns. Servers and platforms can also be examined in the same way. The software underpins a new consulting service IBM is introducing, called Server Consolidation Factory for System p.

IBM will also install Tivoli Access Manager to control usage.

The System p news should help IBM in its contest with server makers committed to Intel’s Itanium platform. This band includes HP, NEC, Unisys and SGI, and was lifted by the recent announcement of Montecito, a dual-core implementation of the processor that dramatically accelerates performance.

However, most large customers are likely to be too embedded with their current Unix server provider to jump ship for a relatively modest price-performance gain. “IBM clearly has a great set of benchmarks but any one of these top-end machines from IBM, HP or Sun can run virtually any application or database,” said Rakesh Kumar, vice-president at analyst company Gartner. “I don’t think we’re going to see major shifts in market share in the near future.”

Separately, IBM is today expected to announce details of a new alliance with processor maker AMD. The announcement could relate to a commitment to build more volume server lines around AMD’s Opteron or an endorsement of AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture that will be a platform for third-parties to build application-specific co-processors.

Also last week, IBM began phasing in a change to the way it sells middleware. The new metric is based on “processor value units” in an attempt to better represent the power of underlying hardware than previous metrics such as the number of processors or cores.