New UltraSPARCR IV+ processors are powering five Sun FireTM systems, which are available for purchase immediately. Announced September 20th, the Sun FireTM V490, Sun FireTM V890, Sun FireTM E2900, Sun FireTM E4900 and Sun FireTM E6900 servers are powered by 1.5 GHz UltraSPARC IV+ processors and run the SolarisTM 10 Operating System (Solaris OS).

"We're upping the ante in the server and network computing market," said Sun Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy. "Our R&D investment is delivering products that are setting new industry benchmarks, and providing customers with more innovation and choice. With a billion people on the global network today, and millions more joining each week, Sun is redefining the market in the Participation Age. Sun is delivering significant performance gains, while helping customers reduce power consumption and overall costs."

These new offerings allow customers to leverage the binary compatibility of the UltraSPARC microprocessor and the Solaris OS, so UltraSPARC III and IV customers can easily upgrade their current hardware. Sun reports that upgrading with Sun servers costs half as much as it does with an IBM system and these new systems offer better price/performance than servers using IBM's POWER5 processors and AIX operating system.

"This introduction makes it clear that SPARC and Power are going head-to-head, now that IBM and Dell have de-comitted to Itanium and Hewlett Packard has effectively end-of-lifed HP-UX. And of the two, only SPARC benefits from the features and volume of the open source Solaris 10 Operating System, which supports industry-standard servers from Sun as well as IBM, HP and Dell," said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun president and COO.

These new Sun Fire servers with UltraSPARC IV+ processors deliver up to five times the performance increase over UltraSPARCR III systems, Sun reports. In a Computerworld article, Patrick Thibodeau explained that this latest chip is built with 90-nanometer process technology, which makes it possible for chip makers to put more transistors into a smaller space, thus improving chip performance and power needs. In comparison, 130-nanometer technology is used for the UltraSPARC IV chips.

"This is a new chip, not a speed bump," Bob McGaughey, vice president of product development at Sun told Thibodeau, who also reported that Sun claimed improved performance of the 1.5-GHz, dual-core chip by integrating 2MB of Level 2 cache into it. It includes 32MB of Level 3 cache on the chip board, which is a new feature.

In comparison to competitors, these new Sun Fire servers offer better price/performance as evidenced by a series of world-record benchmarks. Sun summarized these results as follows:

• Sun Fire E4900 server achieved world-record performance for SPECjbb2005. IBM, HP and Fujitsu have not published results on this new benchmark that demonstrates JavaTM server performance.

• Sun Fire E6900 server achieved a world record on Manugistics Fulfilment on Oracle9i Database and Oracle real application clusters, demonstrating a 32 percent performance advantage and a 2.7x price/performance advantage over the IBM p5-590.

• The Sun Fire E2900 server achieved an overall world record on IBM's own Lotus Domino R6iNotes benchmark, with 34,000 users, producing the highest number of NotesMark transactions/min (28,268 N-Mark). This result beats the IBM i5-570 in performance by 19 percent at half the price per user.

• The Sun Fire V890 server achieved world-record price/performance for servers with more than two sockets on IBM's Lotus Domino R6iNotes benchmark. The Sun Fire V890 delivered 18 percent better $/user than the IBM p5-570 and 49 percent better performance.

Sun has also proved additional compelling performance comparisons against competitors:

• On SPECjbb2000, the 24-way Sun Fire E6900 outperforms 32-way Itanium-based HP servers, a 32-way Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER 1500, and a 16-way IBM p5-570.

• For scientific computing on the LINPACK "N" benchmark, the Sun Fire E6900 also outperformed a 1.9GHz IBM p5-570 by 22 percent.

"We're in a new cycle of innovation for SPARC that delivers incredible performance gains," said David Yen, executive vice-president, Sun's Scalable Systems Group. "Scalable high performance processing, combined with the same power consumption, footprint and price as previous generations, make the new Sun Fire servers the ideal platform for server consolidation."

Pricing for the new Sun Fire Servers with the UltraSPARC IV+ processors ranges from USD$30,995 to $180,000. [...read more...]

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