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More details of HP's forthcoming Tukwila Itanium 9300 servers have come to light thanks to TPC-H data warehousing benchmark test results that HP has just published.

When HP announced the first of its Itanium 9300 servers three weeks ago, the company's techies gave out some of the salient characteristics of the new blade-architected Superdome 2 servers. But a lot of the feeds and speeds were unanswered about the machines, which are due to ship in the second half of this year. The new TPC-H numbers fill some of the gaps.

The bottom 10Us of the CB900s i2 blade server looks exactly like any other HP blade server, plugging into the blade enclosure's VirtualConnect or other kinds of switching and its Insight Control management tools. The upper 8Us of the Superdome 2 blade is where the sx3000 chipset made by HP does its work, gluing together 16 sockets - that's eight blades with a total of 64 processor cores - into a single system image.

This time around the Superdome crossbar implemented in the sx3000 is fully redundant and fault tolerant, unlike HP's prior Yosemite, Pinnacles sx1000, and Arches sx2000 chipsets. The CB900s i2 blade has 32 DDR3 memory slots, but HP did not say what capacities of memory it was supporting.

According to the TPC-H test result, the Superdome 2-16s server costs $56,500. Each CB900s i2 blade server is equipped with a top-bin 1.73GHz Itanium 9350, which has a 24MB L3 cache and a Turbo Boost speed of 1.86GHz. In the pricing portion of the test, HP labels this as the real clock speed - which it is not - but elsewhere in the report it's labeled correctly at 1.73GHz. (You can see the feeds and speeds of the five Tukwila Itanium chips, which were launched in early February, here.)

With two Itanium 9350s, that CB900s i2 blade costs a whopping $44,000, and even at list price, the two Itanium chips cost only $7,676 in 1,000-unit quantities. That 31.5-inch blade server, devoid of CPUs and memory, costs $36,324 - not bad for a big ol' motherboard with some chipset magic in it.

HP has cooked up a special 512GB memory bundle for the Superdome 2-16s machine, which costs $112,000 - that's $219 per GB. HP didn't provide the memory capacity of the Superdome 2 machines when it announced them in April, but using 4GB memory sticks, HP should be able to put 1TB of memory on the eight blades in this box.

The Superdome 2-16s system, CB900s i2 blade, and memory bundle won't be available until October 20, according to the full disclosure report from the TPC. Ditto for the HP-UX 11i v3 license for the machine, which will cost $5,450 per socket.

As El Reg reported last week, HP tweaked its HP-UX 11i v3 Unix variant with the March 2010 update, adding support for the Tukwila Itaniums to the operating system along with a number of other features, including live migration of running guests inside of Integrity VM partitions.

HP also said - vaguely - that it had shifted to per-socket pricing for its new round of Tukwila systems, which would result in as much as a 50 per cent price cut compared to per-core licenses on early Itanium-based machines. The Base Operating Environment license on prior Superdome machines, as this story revealed, cost $2,370 per core. Had the pricing remained the same, HP-UX would have cost $151,680 on this 16-socket Superdome 2 box. But the March 2010 update will only run $87,200 on this machine, representing a 42.5 per cent cut in software license costs.

To complete the Superdome 2 system tested using the TPC-H data warehousing benchmark, HP tossed in four Superdome 2 external I/O enclosures, a ProCurve 6120XG blade switch, and a rack, bringing the hardware price to $579,138. Toss in another $321,742 for three years of maintenance, another $566,665 for systems software (HP-UX plus Oracle 11g), and $709,617 for MSA 2324fc Fibre Channel disk arrays with 41TB of disk capacity spread across 580 disks, and the whole shebang costs $2.18m.

Then shave off 21.8 per cent in discounts, bringing it down to just over $1.7m.

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