SANTA CLARA, Calif., FEB. 8, 2006 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) today announced strong market momentum for the UltraSPARC(R) IV+ processor-based Sun Fire server family: Five new record-breaking performance benchmarks and rapid customer adoption. Customers are upgraing quickly to the recently-announced server line, which offers an up to five times performance increase over UltraSPARC III servers and double the performance over previous UltraSPARC generations at the same power consumption in the same footprint and for the same price.

UltraSPARC IV+ delivers the industry's only "on the fly" upgrade path that has allowed customers like NBC's NBCOlympics.com and Abacus to leverage the binary compatibility of the Solaris 10 OS, enabling a seamless transition to the latest server technology and a guarantee that their applications will just run. The value proposition of the UltraSPARC IV+ processor-based server line is increased with Oracle's new multi-core pricing policy, which helps customers take advantage of the latest advancements in multi-core design.

"Today we announce the second wave of world-record benchmarks on the UltraSPARC IV+ platform that further distances us from all competing server platforms on the market. Our new cycle of UltraSPARC innovation is delivering incredible gains for our customers who are looking for the best performance and value," said David Yen, executive vice-president, Scalable Systems Group, Sun Microsystems.

Customers Demand High-Performance and Scalability

NBC and Abacus are two examples of the many new customers that are using the new UltraSPARC IV+ processor-based systems for significant performance gains, ease of upgrades and better overall system value.

• NBC's NBCOlympics.com, the official NBC Website of the 2006 Winter Games in Torino, Italy, will be powered by a combination of Sun Fire(TM) v490 UltraSPARC IV+ processor-based systems and Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers. The servers run the Solaris 10 operating system with Sun N1 System Manager to ensure maximum uptime, fault recovery and load management. In the lead-up to and during the Games, Sun Services is providing installation, engineering expertise and support to NBCOlympics.com.
• Abacus, the leading provider of cooperative data, data management and analytical services for direct marketing, purchased three UltraSPARC IV+ Sun Fire V490 servers. Abacus runs its own large Data Warehousing application that builds lists for direct marketing activities, and will leverage Sun services to help manage its entire data center.

"During our testing phase we ran custom Abacus applications and achieved a two times performance gain. The upgrade to UltraSPARC IV+ processors was a business decision for us that will save us a considerable amount of time and engineering resources while, at the same time, gave us performance increases and cost savings on power, cooling and space," said Doug Tschudy, Vice President of Systems and Network Services at Abacus.

World-Record Performance Continues to Raise the Bar

Sun announced five performance leading results, including three new world-record benchmarks for a wide range of data center application environments (see footnotes):

• Sun Fire E25K achieved a new world record TPC-H SF3000 benchmark with the Solaris 10 OS running Oracle(R) Database 10g Release 2, yet again outperforming IBM POWER5 server and beating the HP Integrity Superdome Itanium server by 47 percent.(1)
• Sun Fire UltraSPARC IV+ processor-based systems running Oracle 10G R2 exceeded existing results on the Avaloq Banking KTB 2.0.6 benchmark, enabling Avaloq to process 464 transactions per second, far exceeding previous results which topped out under 400.(2)
• Sun Fire E6900 Systems and Sun Fire T2000 with CoolThreads(TM) Technology combined together delivered a world record result for the SPECjAppServer2004 Benchmark in the standard category, beating out Intel Itanium and Xeon and IBM POWER5+ architecture-based systems.(3)
• Sun Fire E6900 exceeded previous world records on the SPECjbb2005 benchmark, beating out recent results based on a Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 480 Itanium server and an IBM POWER5 by 6 percent and 40 percent respectively.(4)
• Sun Fire E25K outperformed top benchmark results on the SPEC CPU2000 SPECint_rate2000 benchmark over IBM POWER5 server and HP Integrity Superdome Itanium server by 27 percent and 32 percent respectively.(5)

  Pricing and Availability

  Starting at $30,995, the flagship UltraSPARC IV+ server family is available immediately and includes the V490, V890, E2900, E4900, E6900, E20K and E25k servers, in addition to the UltraSPARC T1 processor-based Sun Fire T2000 servers announced last December, 2005.

  About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

  A singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- guides Sun in the development of technologies that power the world's most important markets. Sun's philosophy of sharing innovation and building communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the Participation Age. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.

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  Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris, Sun Fire, N1 and The Network is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and in other countries. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the US and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
  
  Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

  Benchmark Footnotes:
  (1)The 72-way Sun Fire E25K with 1.5 GHz UltraSPARC IV+ processors with 108 Sun StorEdge(TM) 3510 SE arrays running the industry-leading Solaris 10 OS and Oracle Database 10g Release 2 achieved 105,430.9 QphH@3000GB on the TPC-H SF3000 benchmark, surpassing the IBM eServer p5 595 by five percent and the HP Integrity Superdome by 47 percent. See http://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_results.asp?orderby=hardware
  
  Sun Fire E25K 105,430.9 QphH@3000GB, $54.87/QphH@3000GB, avail 01/27/06, IBM eServer p5 595 100,512.3 QphH@3000GB, $53.32/QphH@3000GB, avail 03/01/06, HP Integrity Superdome 71,847.8 QphH@3000GB, $55.79/QphH@3000GB, avail 01/18/06. TPC-H, QphH, $/QphH tm of Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). More info www.tpc.org
  
  (2) On the Avaloq Banking KTB 2.0.6 Benchmark, Eight Sun UltraSPARC IV+ system with 16 cores running Solaris 10 on the Oracle 10gR2 database beat previous results from IBM and HP which only achieved 333 and 397 transactions per second, respectively. The Sun and Oracle combination can linearly scale up to a system of 48 CPUs on Sun hardware and can power Avaloq's Banking System to new levels of price/performance.
  
  (3) Seven Sun Fire T2000 UltraSPARC T1 processor-based application servers and a Sun Fire E6900 based on 20 UltraSPARC IV+ processors at 1.5 Ghz achieved 4098.77 JOPS for the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark using the UltraSPARC T1 processor for the application tier and the UltraSPARC IV+ processor in the database tier, all running the Solaris 10 OS. The T2000 used the BEA WebLogic Server 9.0 and the E6900 used the Oracle 10g database. The Sun Fire T2000 servers demonstrated 40 percent better performance over a cluster of eight IBM POWER5+ P550 in the application tier and required less than half the space of the IBM servers. The Sun servers also demonstrated 9.7 percent better performance over a cluster of eight HP rx4640 servers in the application tier and required less than half the space of the HP servers. The T2000 and E6900 running Solaris 10 demonstrated support for over 24,000 concurrent users accessing J2EE applications and also highlighted the performance benefits of the BEA Weblogic Server on Sun Fire T2000 servers. See http://www.spec.org/jAppServer2004/
  
  SPECjAppServer2004 7 Sun Fire T2000's (56 cores, 7 chips) and 1 Sun Fire E6900 (40 cores, 20 chips) 4098.77 JOPS@Standard. 8 IBM p5+ 550 (32 cores, 16 chips) and IBM p5 570 (8 cores, 4 chips) 2921.48 JOPS@Standard. 8 HP rx4640 (32 cores, 32 chips) and HP 9000 Superdome (48 cores, 24 chips) 3734.68 JOPS@Standard. SPEC, SPECjAppServer reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 01/18/2006.
  
  (4) On the SPECjbb 2005 benchmark, the 24-way Sun Fire E6900 with 1.5GHz UltraSPARC IV+ processors outperformed a 32-way Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 480 with 1.6GHz Itanium 2 processors by 42 percent on a per-processor basis , surpassing the Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 480 by six percent on overall performance. The Sun Fire E6900 achieved a world record for systems with up to 32 processor chips. The 24-way Sun Fire E6900 with 1.5 GHz US-IV+ also surpassed the 16-way IBM System p5 570 with 1.9GHz POWER5 by 40 percent. See http://www.spec.org/jbb2005/results/
  
  SPECjbb2005 Sun Fire E6900 (24-way, 24 chips, 48 cores) 342,578 bops, 28,548bops/JVM submitted for review, Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 480 (32 chips, 32 cores) 322,719 bops, 40,340 bops/JVM, IBM eServer p5 570 (8 chips, 16 cores, 16-way) 244,361 bops, 30,545 bops/JVM . SPEC, SPECjbb reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results as of 01/23/06 on www.spec.org.
  
  (5) For the SPEC CPU2000 SPECint_rate2000 benchmark, the Sun Fire E25K with 72 UltraSPARC IV+ 1.5GHz processors outperformed IBM's top record with its IBM p5-595, 1900 Mhz, 64 CPU, SMT on, by 27 percent. The same Sun system surpassed the HP Integrity Superdome 1.6GHz/9MB Itanium 2, 16 cells, by 32 percent. The 72-way configured Sun Fire E25K with 1.5 Ghz processors also improved its performance over a similar Sun Fire E25K with UltraSPARC IV 1.2GHz processors by 71 percent and showed an improvement of 1.97 times the performance of a 36-way Sun Fire E20K system. See http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/results/rint2000.html.
  
  SPEC, SPECint reg tm of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 2/2/06. Sun Fire E25K US-IV+ @1.5GHz (72-way, 72 chips, 144 cores), 1459 SPECint_rate2000; Sun Fire E25K US-IV+ @1.5GHz (64-way, 64 chips, 128 cores), 1221 SPECint_rate2000; Sun Fire E25K US-IV+ @1.5GHz (48-way, 48 chips, 96 cores), 988 SPECint_rate2000; Sun Fire E25K US-IV+ @1.5GHz (36-way, 36 chips, 72 cores), 739 SPECint_rate2000; Sun Fire E25K US-IV @1.2GHz (72-way, 72 chips, 144 cores), 852 SPECint_rate2000; IBM p5 595 @ 1.9GHz (32 chips, 64-way, 64 cores, 128 threads), 1147 SPECint_rate2000; HP Integrity Superdome @1.5 GHz (64-way, 64 chips, 64 cores), 904 SPECint_rate2000.

   
  

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