In a recent blog BM Seer reports the world record breaking results of the Sun Blade X6440 server module (2.7 GHz Opteron 8384 "Shanghai") running OpenSolaris 2008.05 and using Sun Studio Express 11/08 compilers. The Sun Blade X6440 delivered a SPECompM2001 x86 16-thread result of 35896.

The Sun Blade X6440 server module (2.7 GHz Opteron 8384 'Shanghai') was 19% faster on SPECompM2001 while consuming 9% less power (measured in watts), than the same Sun Blade with AMD Opteron 8356 processors, Seer writes.

The Sun system also beat the Supermicro H8QM8 result by 4%, even though the X6440 uses DDR667 memory and the Supermicro uses DDR800 memory. This was made possible, Seer explains, by using OpenSolaris 2008.5 plus the Sun Studio Express 11/08 compiler rather than SuSE Linux 10 SP1 with the PathScale compiler used by Supermicro.

Seer is careful to add the editorial observation that Sun continues to measure watts on actual performance benchmark runs on real-sized memory configurations. The SPEComp results were run with 32GB on the Sun Blade. If a vendor does not measure watts, then customers really need to ask why vendors avoid publicly showing everyone easy to measure data.

The benchmark winning Sun Blade X6440 also bested the AMD Tyan Thunder 425QE with Opteron 8360 2.5GHz processor (30275 peak result) and the AMD Tyan Thunder 425QE with Opteron 8356 2.32 GHz processor (28283 peak result).

The most striking power usage was demonstrated by in the systemwide saving realized by the AMD Opteron 8384 vs. the AMD Opteron 8356. The maximum power drawn in watts was a mere 46 watts or 9%.

Read BM Seer's complete blog posting here.

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