9000 Series 800 H70. The processor-based SPEC test implies the Sun system has a significant performance superiority, nearly 2.7 times better. TPC testing provides a platform to look at the entire computing workload. Just using a processor benchmark can be very misleading. Instead everyone is a winner.
TPC results help to act as a sanity check on such claims of performance leadership.
A company may have an intention to support a particular product, but at present no such product exists, except perhaps in the lab. Or a product is announced and available today and will perform satisfactorily. Sometimes it is not clear into which category a particular product or technology fits. Many vendors have announced, and in many cases released, hardware platforms which support a certain number of processors. What they all have in common is that at the time of writing their best non-clustered TPC result consisted of a configuration with exactly half the number of potential maximum stated CPUs.