Sun Fire X4640 server is fastest x64 system for enterprise and technical applications

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Dec. 8 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced its new Sun Fire X4640 server, based on the Six-Core AMD Opteron processor, delivered outstanding performance on industry-standard benchmarks. These results highlight the enterprise-class performance and significant infrastructure and management cost savings Sun's integrated infrastructure with the Solaris Operating System (OS) deliver through the convergence of compute, networking and storage.

The new Sun Fire X4640 server uses up to eight Six-Core AMD Opteron processors in 4RU, making it the most compact 24- to 48-core system available from tier one vendors. With up to 65 percent better performance than the previous generation Sun Fire X4600M2 server(1) and up to half a terabyte of memory in 64 memory slots, the Sun Fire X4640 server helps customers increase data center efficiency and is an exemplary platform for enterprise databases and HPC applications as well as virtualization and consolidation. The Sun Fire X4640 server supports the Solaris, Windows and Linux operating systems and VMware, Solaris Containers and Microsoft Hyper-V for virtualization. For more information on the Sun Fire X4640 server visit sun.com/x4640 and for Sun's full line of x64 servers, visit http://www.sun.com/x64.

The benchmark results announced today are:

Two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark -- The Sun Fire X4640 server with eight AMD Opteron processors (48 cores, 48 threads) delivered an outstanding x86 Unicode-based result and set an eight-processor world record with 10,000 SAP SD Benchmark users running the SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP 6.0 application (Unicode)(2). The SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark represents the critical tasks performed in real-world ERP business environments and demonstrates the performance of systems running sell-from-stock workloads. The outstanding result achieved on the latest Unicode version of the benchmark demonstrates the advantage of deploying the Sun Fire X4640 server and Solaris OS for customers looking to gain seamless multilingual support with SAP applications.

Versus the competition on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark, the Sun Fire X4640 server running SAP solutions with Oracle Database on top of the Solaris 10 OS, delivered:

• 21 percent better performance than an eight-processor HP ProLiant DL785 G6 system that utilized faster CPUs and ran the Windows OS(3)
• 33 percent better performance than a 16-processor NEC Express 5800 server(4)
• 2.7x the performance of a four-processor IBM System 550 server(5)

SPECompL2001 -- The Sun Fire X4640 server with eight AMD Opteron model 8435 processors running the Solaris 10 10/09 OS with Sun Studio 12 Update 1 compiler software, posted the top x86 result on SPECompL2001(6). The SPEC OMP benchmark represents workloads often used in high-energy physics, weather modeling, computational chemistry and mechanical design, and consists of medium and large problem sets that stress the computer's processor, memory, compilers and OpenMP implementation. Running parallel applications with 48 compute threads and half a terabyte of memory, the Sun Fire X4640 server is well suited for memory intensive, technical workloads and extends Solaris OS and Sun Studio leadership in the OpenMP space using x86 architectures.

Details on the outstanding results announced today and other world records are available at http://www.sun.com/benchmarks.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:JAVA) develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.

1) Results of the Sun Fire X4600M2 (8 processors / 32 cores / 32 threads) running Solaris 10, Oracle 10g, SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP (Unicode) on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark: 6,050 SAP SD Benchmark users; 33,230 SAPS. SAP certification number 2009022.

2) Results of the Sun Fire X4640 (8 processors / 48 cores / 48 threads) running Solaris 10, Oracle 10g, and SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP (Unicode) on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark: 10,000 SAP SD Benchmark users; 55,070 SAPS. SAP certification number 2009049.

3) Results of the HP DL 785 (8 processors / 48 cores / 48 threads) running Windows OS, Microsoft SQL server, and SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP (Unicode) on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark: 8,280 SAP SD Benchmark users; 45,350 SAPS. SAP certification number 2009035.

4) Results of the NEC Express 5800 (16 processors / 96 cores / 96 threads) running Windows OS, Microsoft SQL server, and SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP (Unicode) on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark: 7,500 SAP SD Benchmark users; 41,070 SAPS. SAP certification number 2009016.

5) Results of the IBM System 550 (4 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads) running AIX 6.1, DB2 9.5, and SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP (Unicode) on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark: 3,752 SAP SD Benchmark users; 20,520 SAPS. SAP certification number 2009023.

6) SPEC and the benchmark name SPEComp are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from this announcement and www.spec.org, as of 12/06/09. Sun Fire X4640 server (8 chips, 48 cores, 48 OMP threads) 381,017 SPECompLpeak2001.

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About Sun Microsystems, Inc.