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Wednesday January 10, 2007

Sun announces new Blade Servers with World Record Performance
Sun today announced the fastest and the industry's only 4 socket dual-core 2.8GHz AMD Opteron 8000 series processor based blade server (announcement is here).
And it packs an enormous performance punch! Here are the latest World Record Benchmarks for SPEC CPU2006 rate and SPEC OMP2001, using Sun Studio 11 and Solaris 10 with these blades:

The blade server module posted an 8-thread SPECompM2001 score of 23224 on the medium size problem set. That score bested the latest competing 8 thread SPECompM2001 result of 19983, achieved by 4 cores/2 chips IBM System p5 550, by 16%.
Beating the competition to the punch, the Sun Blade X8420 server module equipped with the fastest available Dual-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processors posted record x86 throughput scores on both the SPEC CPU2000 and SPEC CPU2006 suites (note: the SPEC CPU2006 benchmark, which supersedes the SPEC CPU2000 suite, provides a broader variety of workloads and better real-world applicability of the results and consists of two benchmark suites where one suite measures and compares compute-intensive integer performance and the other measures and compares floating point performance) SPECint_rate2006 score of 93.1 and the SPECfp_rate2006 result of 87.3.

These numbers clearly set this blade server module apart from the competition at this stage, delivering compelling performance differentiation. Look at the disclosure below for competitive numbers. What makes these boxes even more interesting is the Sun Refresh Service (read here) which will keep your blade servers upto date in this fast changing marketplace (especially with the exciting upcoming speedbumps and quad-core processors from AMD and Intel).

Required Disclosure Statements:

SPEC, SPEComp, SPECCfp and SPECfp Rate are Registered Trademarks of Standard Performance Evaluation Sun's results were submitted for review. For SPEC comparisons, socket equates to chip.
Competitive results from www.spec.org as of Jan 05, 2007. Sun's results were submitted for review

Sun Blade X8420 (4xAMD Opteron model 8220, 8 cores, 4 chips, 2 cores/chip, 8 threads, Solaris10): SPECompM2001 –23224;
IBM System p5 550 (POWER5+, 4 cores, 2 chips, 2 cores/chip, 8 threads, AIX5L V5.3): SPECompM2001 – 19,983;
HP ProLiant DL585 (4xAMD Opteron model 880, 8 cores, 4 chips, 2 cores/chip, 8 threads, RedHat EL AS): SPECompM2001 – 17948

Sun Blade X8420 (4xAMD Opteron model 8220, 8 cores, 4 chips, 2 cores/chip, 8 threads, SLES 9): SPECint_rate2006 –93.1.
Sun Blade X8420 (4xAMD Opteron model 8220, 8 cores, 4 chips, 2 cores/chip, 8 threads, Solaris10): SPECfp_rate2006 – 87.3.

Posted by tatkar ( Jan 10 2007, 07:42:55 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

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