Hewlett-Packard released new server speed-test results Wednesday that, for the first time, compare its version of Unix with Windows on the company's top-end Itanium server--and Unix came out ahead. An HP Integrity Superdome with 64 Itanium 2 6M "Madison" processors posted a score of 824,000 transactions per minute on the Transaction Processing Performance Council's widely watched TPC-C test of a single computer running a busy database. The speed beat not only IBM's previous No. 1 result of 764,000 in June but also the previous top result before that, in May, of 707,000 transactions from a system made up of an HP Superdome server running Windows.

The result provides instructive new information in the years-long competition between Unix and Windows. Although the two operating systems have been pitted against each other, rarely has it been on the same hardware. Although the system with HP's version of Unix, called HP-UX, was faster, it cost $6.8 million compared with $5.1 million for the Windows system. HP's Superdome can simultaneously run Linux, Windows and HP-UX in separate partitions. However, the collection of software needed to make such a system is more mature for HP-UX than for Windows or Linux.