Sun Ultra 27 Workstation

The Sun Ultra 27 workstation equipped with a single Intel Xeon W3580 processor and a single nVidia FX5800 graphics card, has produced industry-leading results on the SPECviewperf benchmark. In 6 out of 8 SPECviewperf 10 workloads, which vary from automotive design to scientific visualization, the Sun Ultra 27 workstation has demonstrated superior performance when compared to all other posted single graphics card results as of November 16, 2009. The Sun Ultra 27 workstation, running Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate operating system, beats the Dell Precision Workstation T3500 and HP xw4600 workstation by 11 percent on average. The SPECviewperf is a synthetic benchmark designed to be an indicator of rendering performance for systems running OpenGL and is based on 8 of the most prominent high-end 3D graphics applications capable of rendering large data sets. SPECviewperf 10 does not require an application software license to run, and therefore, is accessible to a wider range of users, enabling direct performance comparisons of graphics hardware.

• Press Release

• Benchmark Results

The Sun Ultra 27, Sun's newest workstation, extends the reach of Sun's portfolio of open network systems to the desktop by claiming the best single-task floating-point performance for all single-socket systems.

The compound effect of OpenSolaris and Sun Studio 12 Update 1 compiler software running on a next-generation workstation results in a new world record result on SPECfp2006 benchmark, with a 12% lead over the next best score.

The SPEC CPU2006 benchmark exercises a computer's processor, memory architecture, and compilers on a variety of real-world compute intensive workloads and consists of two benchmark suites. One suite measures and compares compute-intensive integer performance and the other measures and compares floating point performance. For each of these suites, two metrics are collected. One measures how fast the computer completes a single task and the other measures how many tasks a computer can accomplish in a certain amount of time (the throughput).

Benchmark Outcome

• OS and compiler software help deliver the best performance by providing optimizations tailored to a specific hardware platform or microprocessor architecture. The community-developed OpenSolaris OS and freely available Sun Studio 12 Update 1 compiler software, running on top of the latest Intel Xeon-based architecture, propelled the Sun Ultra 27 workstation, equipped with Intel Xeon W3570 processors (4 cores, 8 threads), to the top position with a SPECfp2006 result of 45.4.
• Additionally, the SPECfp_base2006 score of 41.3 is better than all published highly optimized peak scores, proving superiority of Sun's software offering and providing well-balanced performance to a wide variety of applications.
• With this result, the Sun Ultra 27, an integral part of Sun's open network systems offering, demonstrates the value of an Sun's software stack that should appeal to both large corporations and independent software developers, as it allows them to explore the value and many advanced features of the community-developed open source OS and freely available award-winning compiler tools.

• Press Release