Who is correct?

I had a meeting today that got me thinking about claims of efficiency, and here was my two minute tongue in cheek web search findings, try the search yourself to be confused ;)

Dell states:
15% better performance per watt than HP
10% better performance per watt than IBM

HP states:
In a direct comparison, the HP ProLiant BL260c G5 server blade with HP Thermal Logic Technology achieved 11.7% and 43.7% better performance/watt than Dell and IBM competitors, respectively.

IBM states:
The Power 570 is more than 10% better than the HP Integrity rx8640 Server and more than double the Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 Server in performance per WATT

Sun states:
The Sun Fire T1000 server delivers 1.3x greater performance than the 4-way IBM p5 550 with 1.9 GHz POWER5+ processors, while consuming over 4X less power and occupying 1/4 the space. The Sun Fire T1000 delivers nearly 5.5X higher performance per watt than IBM's Power 5 / AIX solution.


Okay so I know I am being facetious and none of these are apples for apples comparisons with the current best of breed from each supplier but it does highlight how challenging these claims become to validate. I am going to put apples with apples in the lab and see what the truth is, I don't think there is another way to do it.

I hope each of the suppliers will allow me to publish the findings.... we shall see...