SUN'S VENERABLE ENTERPRISE 10000 SERVER BEATS IBM'S FULLY CONFIGURED P690/HPC ON APP BENCHMARK.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) has submitted results of 230,049 operations per second (op/s) on the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation Java Business Benchmark 2000 (SPECjbb2000) using the Sun Enterprise 10000 server, aka Starfire, easily surpassing IBM's fully configured p690/HPC (Regatta) system performance of 169,794 op/s. Based on the benchmark configuration list prices, Sun's Starfire server achieved better price performance than IBM's p690/HPC with Sun's price performance of $8.95/op/s* versus IBM's $9.26/op/s.

Additionally, Sun submitted a SPECjbb2000 result of 213,378 op/s using 400Mhz CPUs, which again outperformed IBM's p690/HPC with 1300Mhz CPUs. These results and the fact that IBM has only shown 16-way results on the Regatta p690 system brings into question whether or not the IBM p690 architecture and AIX operating system have the capacity to scale to more than 16 CPUs.

These results come on top of those submitted earlier this month, in which the Sun Fire 6800 Midframe server and the Solaris 8 Operating Environment achieved 174,658 operations per second, beating IBM's fully configured p690 system performance. Based on these results, not only does Sun's previous generation high-end systems beat IBM's Regatta, but Sun's Midframe systems are proven to have 31 percent better price performance.

The SPECjbb2000 benchmark tests the performance of a Java application-tier portion of a multi-tier data center application. Sun now holds the top four fastest results in SPECjbb2000 with distinct midrange and high-end systems, whereas IBM is in a distant fifth place.

With these results, Sun remains the only vendor to post scores above 200,000 and 300,000 showing the high performance of the Sun Servers with the Solaris Operating Environment.

Further illustrating the advanced technology and proven performance of Sun systems, the SPECjbb2000 Application Benchmark results announced recently were achieved with a server first introduced nearly five years ago. The Starfire server was compared against and easily beat p690/HPC, which is IBM's latest system introduced only weeks ago and is not yet shipping in volume. Sun's Starfire server, on the other hand, continues to put its superior performance to work, powering the networks and lowering the total cost of ownership of a wide range of customers, including British Telecom, eBay, and Texas Instruments.

SPECjbb2000 is the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation's benchmark for evaluating server-side Java performance. With Java technology running on a wide range of hardware, benchmark performance becomes a key way to compare systems performance, and SPECjbb2000 gives Java technology users an objective and representative benchmark for measuring a system's ability to run Java technology-based server applications. Java technology-based software runs on all major enterprise and desktop operating systems including the Solaris Operating Environment, Linux, AIX, OS/390, HP-UX, Windows, and Macintosh, as well as on client devices, such as cell phones, PDAs, and pagers. The Java technology provides the industry's most comprehensive cross-system application development and deployment platform.

The SPECjbb2000 models a three-tier system, the most common type of server-side Java application. SPECjbb2000 focuses on business logic and object manipulation and the work of a middle-tier Java server workload. The workload benchmarked is a typical business-critical workload, including order-entry, inquiry and payment processing. The benchmark was run on a 64-way Sun E10000 configuration with 466 Mhz UltraSPARC II processors and 64GB of memory running the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE), version 1.3.1-02.