HP And Microsoft ReClaim Top Benchmark

Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft on Wednesday reclaimed the top spot in a closely watched computer benchmark test.

The companies said an HP Superdome server running 64 Itanium 2 "Madison" chips crunched a record 707,102 transactions per minute on the Transaction Processing Council TPC-C benchmark for business-computing workloads on non-clustered systems. The server, running Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition operating system and SQL Server 2000 database software, eclipsed a result submitted by IBM less than two weeks ago.

IBM's 32-CPU pSeries machine performed 680,613 transactions per minute. Earlier this month, that was good enough to surpass another HP Superdome running Microsoft software that held the No. 1 spot in late April.

HP and Microsoft's latest result yielded a cost per transaction of $9.13, vs. $9.82 for their late-April submission.

The announcement came as Microsoft on opened its seventh annual CEO Summit, at which more than 100 business leaders visit Microsoft's Redmond, Wash. headquarters to meet with chairman Bill Gates and other company executives.