Additionally, the company announced that it has already shipped tens of thousands of "Galaxy" Sun Fire X4100 and Sun Fire X4200 servers based on Single- and Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors to hundreds of customers since the servers were announced last September.

"We're not at all surprised by the extremely high demand we've seen with our Sun Fire x64 servers, especially Galaxy," said Graham Lovell, senior director of x64 servers, Network Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "Unit shipments of Sun Fire x64 servers, powered by AMD Opteron processors, were up 87 percent in our second quarter, signifying that customers are seriously considering our performance, power and cost advantages over the competition. Our new world-record benchmarks and price cuts will make our servers that much more attractive than competitive offerings."

Sun Fire x64 Servers Set New World Records

Sun Fire X4100 and Sun Fire X4200 servers, powered by Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors with Direct Connect Architecture, set three new x86 world records on SPECjbb2005 benchmark (bops/JVM) with the following operating systems:

Solaris 10, Microsoft Windows 2003 Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4: The benchmark emulates the design of real-world server-side Java applications and provides an accurate reflection of the business logic and objects, while stressing the implementation of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and the scalability of the system's processors and memory.

Since the benchmark stresses overall JVM performance, it was used to demonstrate that Java HotSpot Server Virtual Machine, version J2SE
5.0_06 can deliver outstanding results and optimized performance, regardless of the underlying OS. Specific highlights of the results include:

• The Sun Fire X4200 SPECjbb2005 result beat the Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX300 server by 17% and is more than 24% faster than the IBM xSeries eServer 346. Both competing systems were outfitted with the dual-core 2.8 GHz Xeon DP processors.
  
• The Sun Fire X4200 SPECjbb2005 result beat the nearest Windows result by more than 6%.
  
• Industry first SPECjbb2005 submission under the widely used Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS.

Additionally, the 16-processor cluster based on Sun Fire X2100 servers, each outfitted with AMD Opteron processor Model 152 and the Cisco Infiniband (IB) PCI-Express adapter, outperforms all results published by other hardware vendors on EXA PowerFLOW benchmark. EXA's PowerFLOW CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) application is an MCAE application used by the major engineering companies in a variety of disciplines such as aerospace, automotive and chemical. The EXA PowerFLOW benchmark consists of two compute and memory intensive suites with small and large data sets. In both cases, the cost-effective solution based on high-performance single-processor Sun Fire X2100 servers is superior to all other results, including Itanium2 and POWER5-based submissions, by a significant margin, setting a new World Record for the clusters of this size.

Specifically:

• The cluster based on 16 Sun Fire X2100 servers is over 48% faster than HP DL140-based cluster with 16 Intel Xeon EM64T processors and IB interconnect.
  
• Sun's solution is up to 24% faster then HP DL 145-based cluster equipped with 16 AMD Opteron processors and Myrinet interconnect.