One feature Intel built into Itanium is special circuitry to accelerate encryption operations that otherwise take place in much slower software. HP announced new speed test results that reflect that advantage. The Itanium 2 6M Madison chip is similar to the first Itanium 2 McKinley model, but it runs at a faster clock rate, has more high-speed cache memory, and is built using a manufacturing process with smaller 130-nanometre features which means that the chip consumes less power and gives off less waste heat. An HP rx5670 server with four Itanium 2 6M processors was able to handle 3,344 simultaneous encrypted Web server connections according to the SPECweb99_SSL speed test, which measures the speed at which a server can deliver encrypted Web pages. That result bested the performance of Sun Microsystems' four-processor V480, with a score of 568, and IBM's four-processor p630, with a score of 1,988. Future Sun and IBM processors have encryption-acceleration features, though. Another interesting comparison is with HP's rx5670 using the current Itanium 2 processors, which posted a result of 2,280 last year. Switching to the newer processor resulted in a 47 percent improvement on the test. The rx5670 showed a similar jump in a test of SAP's accounting and business software when upgraded with the new processors. The two-tier SAP sales and distribution test, which measures how many sales orders can be placed on a computer, jumped 44 percent from 60,000 line items processed per hour with the Itanium 2 to 86,330 per hour with the Itanium 2 6M.
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