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Xeon has up to 2.45 times the performance 

All recent Intel comparisons were made to the IBM Power® 570 with 4.70GHz processors, announced in May 2007. On April 28, 2009 IBM announced that these processors were withdrawn from marketing, since faster processors were announced for the Power 570 in October 2008.

Power 570 demonstrated 28% more performance per core than HP ProLiant DL370 G6.

The IBM Power 570 demonstrated 28% more performance per core than the HP ProLiant DL370 G6 in the most demanding benchmark run on both the Xeon 5500 servers and POWER6, TPC-C.¹

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Companies can run their largest applications on Xeon with Windows or Linux. 

The Power 570 server scaled to more than 2½ times the systems throughput of the Xeon system for TPC-C. That system introduced in May 2007 had a maximum of 16-processor cores. Today the Power 570 has 32-core Power 570 servers with even more scalability and capacity. In addition, the IBM Power 595 provides more than nine and a half times the throughput of the any Xeon 5500 system — and more than five times the throughput of the Xeon system.¹ The IBM System x3950 M2 has a result of over 1.2 million transactions per minute which is 75% higher than the next best reported result on a Xeon system, also an IBM System. The IBM Power 595 had a result of over 6 million transactions per minute.

Power Systems scale to more than 5 times systems throughput of the best Xeon system for TPC-C

There is more to performance and scalability than benchmark results. As consolidation through virtualization becomes more important to reduce costs by improving system utilization, other systems attributes can also increase in importance.

The following table compares an 8-core Xeon system to an 8-core Power offering.²

Comparison of 8-core Xeon system to 8-core Power offerings

With more than eight times the cache, three times the memory bandwidth, 1.7 times the memory and more I/O bandwidth per core, the IBM Power 550 is appropriately targeted at highly virtualized environments.

Running high transaction rates and highly virtualized environments also increases the impact of outages. The disruption caused by any outage and the associated cost is much higher when there is a large database to recover or there are many users attached to the system.

Power provides a comprehensive set of features to increase availability including First Failure Data Capture, Instruction Retry, Alternate Processor Recovery, Bit Steering (memory), I/O Extended Error Handling, Partition Availability priority and Live Application Mobility. None of these features are available in Xeon systems. It is no wonder that a Yankee Group study showed AIX systems having almost 15 times less downtime than Windows systems.³

AIX Systems have 1/15 the downtime of Windows

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