Building on Sun's momentum in the x86 server market, both systems enable customers to take advantage of Sun's unique systems design approach built around the power of the Solaris Operating System (OS) and AMD's much-anticipated native quad-core processors.

Both of the new systems will take Sun's x64 (x86, 64-bit) server design to a new level of innovation and differentiation from competitive platforms. Just last month, Sun broke into the top 5 in x86 server revenue, gaining market share Y/Y for the seventh straight quarter, in addition to having the highest revenue growth (50.9%) Y/Y among the top 5 vendors in the worldwide x86 server market. (Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker Q2 2007, August 2007)

"Sun's innovative systems design combined with AMD's native quad-core architecture creates an ideal x64 platform optimized for performance, manageability and power efficiency," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group at Sun Microsystems. "Our next-gen systems built on Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors and powered by the enterprise-class capabilities of the Solaris OS will showcase Sun's expertise in designing for HPC, virtualization and web-tier applications."

In the future, Sun plans to incorporate Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors into a number of rackmount and blade platforms, including the Sun Fire X4600 M2, Sun Fire X2200 M2, Sun Fire X4100 M2 and Sun Fire X4200 M2 servers. In addition, the Sun Constellation System will be powered by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors when it goes into production at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas in Austin. The Sun Constellation System, one of the world's first open petascale computing environments, is expected to be one of the most powerful computing platforms in the world -- an example of how quad-core computing and innovative design can be used in both commercial and scientific high performance computing environments.

The benefits of quad-core computing will also enhance Sun's virtualization solutions, enabling customers to optimize their IT infrastructure to eliminate server sprawl and contain energy costs. By virtualizing and consolidating to Sun's offerings, customers have already reduced IT costs by as much as $2 million per year, achieved 99.99+% availability, and more than doubled their application performance. For example, Sun customer NewEnergy Associates reaped massive savings by consolidating 18 servers, 22 power supplies, 44 hard drives and 26GB of RAM - all consuming more than 14,000 watts of energy - onto a single Sun Fire x64 server running VMware virtualization software and using 550 watts of energy. When available with Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, the Sun Fire X4600 M2 and other Sun Fire x64 servers will provide even greater scalability and performance for virtualized environments.

"Sun and AMD share a similar philosophy rooted in customer-centric innovation. We are pleased to underscore this mutual legacy by delivering Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors to build out Sun's expansive line of x64 systems," said Randy Allen, corporate vice president and general manager, Server and Workstation Division, AMD. "At the same time, AMD will continue to support Solaris as an enterprise-class OS that is ideal for multi-threaded applications, and highly optimized to take advantage of the performance, scalability, and virtualization functionality offered by the world's most advanced x86 processor." -Sun microsystems