Looking at the Top500

I wanted to see how Itanium was placing in the Top500 against one of the main competitors, IBM Power, so I drew up a little table. In terms of Gflops/Processor Itanium stacks up very well against the competition. I believe I've identified the IBM power offerings for comparison (in blue).

Rmax Sum (Gflops)

Processors

Rmax/Processor

Power4+

97098

25194

3.85

PowerPC 440

364691

169984

2.15

Power4

31092

11552

2.69

PowerPC

64377

11636

5.53

Power5

35581

6216

5.72

Power

23574

26920

0.88

All Power

616413

251502

2.45

IBM Power

187345

69882

2.68

Itanium 2

237385

50668

4.69

Pentium 4 Xeon

398724

135348

2.95

Xeon EM64T

146050

35214

4.15

Intel

782159

221230

3.54

Note there are several minor generations of Itanium's lumped together, whilst the Power line gets a bit more granularity thanks to different versions. Of course the great thing about the Top500 results is you can get a different result depending on what sort of press release you want to write today, so the whole thing should be taken with a grain of salt.