Computer industry research house Gartner Group has got hold of some internal IBM Ramp-C benchmarks of the proprietary AS/400 and the Unix-based RS/6000, and reckons that they show that the latter is economically dramatically the better bet – not only in scientific and technical applications, but also for general business applications. The findings, reported in the Computer Sweden trade weekly, suggest that while the RS/6000 530 can handle up to 100 tasks running at 19,200 transactions per hour and the AS/400 B50 manages 23,900 transactions per hour, the running costs for the latter work out at $16 per transaction per hour, against $10 per transaction per hour for the RS/6000 Model 530.Ramp-C benchmarks quoted by Computer Sweden for the varous AS/400 models are 9,900 for the C10, 13,700 for the C20, 15,800 for the C25, 18,000 for the B45, 23,900 for the B50, 39,600 for the B60 and 53,800 for the B70. The four currently shipping RS/6000 models approximately line up against the C20, C25, B45 and B50 respectively, rating 14,500, 15,200, 19,200 and 22,800 transactions per hour on the Ramp-C benchmark. IBM Sweden noted that IBM is embarking on an aggressive plan to improve the performance of both the RS/6000 and the AS/400, with a top model double the performance of the B70 set for next year, but Gartner reckons that the AS/400 performance probably won’t increase by more than 30% a year in the near term whereas the RS/6000 will have to improve at a much faster rate than that to remain competitive with rival workstations and servers – and there are many more – and cheaper – business appli cations available for Unix systems.
