Solaris 10 Now Available for AMD’s New Dual Core Opteron Platform

Most Advanced Operating System on the Planet for Multi-Core Systems

NEW YORK and SANTA CLARA, Calif.,
April 21, 2005

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced its award-winning Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) supports servers based on the new industry-standard Dual-Core AMD Opteron[TM] processor, including the recently unveiled Sun Fire[TM] V40z server powered by AMD64 dual-core technology. Leveraging more than 20 years of Symmetric Multi-processing (SMP) expertise, Sun has been able to tune the Solaris 10 OS and optimize it for the AMD64 platform to deliver near linear scalability.

“Solaris 10 is the operating system that can unleash the power and capability of systems based on AMD’s new dual-core Opteron processors,” said Tom Goguen, vice president of product marketing, Operating Platforms Group at Sun. “Solaris 10 and Opteron have already aced a number of performance benchmarks and are proving to be an exceptionally powerful combination.”

Solaris 10 offers a wide range of functionality specifically designed to take advantage of multi-core AMD64 and SPARC(r) systems, including:

  • Multi-Core Platform Support: Customers can be assured that all of the Solaris 10 OS features are fully supported on multi-core systems and that many of the most popular features have been specifically engineered to take advantage of multi-core systems. For example, Solaris Containers can allow for finer-grain resource management at the core level. Additionally, the Predictive Self-Healing functionality in Solaris 10 OS can automatically detect failing cores, and take them offline, without taking the entire CPU offline or affecting application availability.
  • Memory Placement Optimization: Originally implemented in 1998 for UltraSPARC(R) servers, Memory Placement Optimization is now supported on AMD64-based systems, improving overall system performance on systems with multiple dual-core CPUs.
  • Application Compatibility Guarantee: All software applications that run on Solaris today stand to benefit from the underlying multi-core functionality and enhancements in the Solaris 10 OS – without any modification or recompilation. There are over 185 open source applications such as Apache, TomCat, Samba and MySQL that are pre-compiled, pre-tested and shipped ready to run on Solaris 10 on SPARC, AMD64 and Intel platforms and more than 1,000 applications certified to run on Solaris 10.
  • Record Breaking Performance: To date, Solaris 10 has achieved more than 14 record-setting benchmarks on AMD64 and SPARC hardware, four of which were based on multi-core systems. For more information, please reference: http://sun.com/solaris/benchmarks.

“The arrival of multi-core gives Opteron(TM) processor-based systems a path to ever escalating performance gains,” said Gordon Haff, Senior Analyst and IT Advisor, Illuminata, Inc. “Add the innovative new features available in Solaris 10 – such as DTrace and Solaris Containers – and you have a very nicely performing and feature-rich option for enterprise customers.”

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision — “The Network Is The Computer” — has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com


Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Sun Fire, Solaris and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices.