Sun Fire x64 series gets quad-core upgrade | | 2008-12-11 | | | Sun has updated its line of Sun Fire x64 servers and Sun Blade systems. The new lines will feature AMD’s "Shanghai" quad-core Opteron processors in place of the previous AMD dual-core "Barcelona" chips.Sun’s benchmark tests show a performance improvement of up to 35 per cent over Barcelona processor equipped machines. The Shanghai processors can consolidate systems at better than a 110:1 ratio and can support up to 100 virtual servers on a single system. The new chips have 6MB of L3 cache (up from 2MB) and a clock range from 2.3GHz to 2.7GHz (up from 2.0GHz to 2.54GHz) while energy consumption remains the same at under 100W.The new Sun Blade blade servers are:the Sun Blade X6440, a four-socket blade server supporting up to 32 Dimm memory slots, with pricing starting at $14,105 (£9,578)the Sun Blade X6240, a two-socket system supporting up to 16 Dimm slots, with pricing starting at $3,850. The five new Sun Fire servers are:the Sun Fire X4440, a four-socket server supporting up to 256GB of main memory, with pricing starting at $15,745.the Sun Fire X6400 M2, a server scaling from two to eight sockets and supporting up to 256GB of main system memory, with pricing starting at $12,595.the Sun Fire X4240, a two-socket system supporting 16 Dimm slots and 128GB of main memory, with pricing starting at $7,245.the Sun Fire X4140 scaling from one to two sockets with 16 Dimm slots and 128GB of main system memory, with pricing starting at $3,545.the Sun Fire X2200 M2, a two-socket system with eight Dimm slots and up to 64GB of main system memory, with pricing starting at $1,895.Sun plans to start shipping in early 2009.The new servers offer a choice of Solaris 10, Linux, Windows and VMware software.Servers running Barcelona chips can upgrade by swapping the processors and installing upgraded firmware. | |
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