Unisys’ 8-Way Results
Unisys recently reported that its implementation of a prerelease version of the eight-way chipset boosted performance of a customer application 2.5 times over a four-way system.
Unisys Corp. (www.unisys.com) recently reported that its implementation of a prerelease version of the eight-way chipset boosted performance of a customer application 2.5 times over a four-way system.
"The application happened to have data that resides in memory so there was no I/O requirement," says Sam Samman, director of software product management at Unisys’ Aquanta Enterprise Server Business. "I wouldn’t call it a rule of thumb," Samman says of the performance gain.
Typical performance boosts with Profusion should be more modest, Samman suggests. "We’re predicting anywhere from 40 percent and 90 percent depending on the application."
Unisys achieved the 2.5 multiple on a Unisys Aquanta ES5085 equipped with eight 500 MHz Intel Pentium III Xeon processors. Notably, the system Unisys compared results against, a four-way Aquanta QS/2 server, was running 400 MHz Pentium II Xeon chips.
Intel applauded the results. In a statement, John Miner, Intel Enterprise Server Group vice president and general manager, credited Unisys’ mainframe-heritage skills in partitioning, advanced systems management and intelligent I/O processing for getting the most out of Profusion.