SUNW: Sun Studio 11 Performance Results Sizzle in Newest Application Benchmark Result; Sun Launches Sun Studio Express Program

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced that its Sun Studio 11 software, Sun's freely available development tool for Solaris and Linux Operating Systems, has again delivered record-setting results across the new benchmark suite provided by The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). Additionally, Sun has launched the Sun Studio Express Program, that enables C, C++, and Fortan developers to preview features intended for future releases. With more than 50,000 registered downloads in the past 6 months, this program was created in response to the rapid adoption and interest in Sun Studio 11 software.


Jochen Rehbock, Head of Product Development with Billing and Loyalty Systems GmbH, confirms, "The quick and knowledgeable support provided by the Sun technical experts as well as the use of Sun Studio 11 were instrumental for making Billit, a modern and future-oriented billing system for the telecommunication industry, a success. Replacing GCC version 3.4.4 with Sun Studio 11 and the STLPort library provided by Sun alone yielded performance improvements in the range of 10 to 25 percent depending on the use case without requiring more than a few lines of code to be changed."

Sun has established an early and commanding lead, taking top honors in 3 of the 4 major metrics (SPECint2006, SPECfp2006, and SPECint_rate2006), using Sun Studio 11 and Solaris 10 on both AMD Opteron and UltraSPARC(R) processor-based systems. Utilizing the most advanced features of Sun Studio 11 software, such as auto-parallelism technology, the Sun Fire X4200 server, equipped with AMD Opteron processors, surpassed rival systems based on Intel processors, such as HP ProLiant DL380 G4 server, as well as the competing HP ProLiant DL385 server. Demonstrating commitment to the high-end commercial computing segment, Sun is also showcasing the flagship Sun Fire E25K server. Optimized with Sun Studio software, these best-in-class systems helped Sun to be the only top server vendor to increase market share, according to the IDC Q206 Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker.

The SPEC CPU2006 Benchmark (announced on August 24, 2006) which is more than 4 times larger than its predecessor, now includes a broader variety of workloads and better real-world applicability of the results. This new benchmark exercises a computer's processor, memory architecture, and compilers on a variety of compute intensive workloads, including protein sequencing, MPEG-4 decoding, XML processing, fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, and speech recognition.

"Sun Studio continues to demonstrate its leadership in its ability to help developers maximize the performance of their applications," said Don Kretsch, senior director, Sun Developer Tools. "With 50,000 downloads in 6 months, enterprise to open source developers are using Sun Studio 11 to reduce development time, increase portability, and improve the performance of their applications."

One of the significant benefits of Sun Studio 11 is the integration between components, which includes optimizing compilers, a multi-thread aware debugger (dbx), performance analysis tools, and a NetBeans-based IDE. The tools components also work on objects created by other compilers which allows developers to easily intermix Sun Studio tools within their current development environment. The newly launched Sun Studio Express Program provides regular snapshots of future releases of Sun Studio under development. The latest snapshot includes optimizing compilers for Linux, demonstrated recently at LinuxWorld, San Francisco 2006. In addition, the new Data Race Detection Tool complements the existing multi-threaded libraries, tools, and compiler optimizations to ease multi-threaded development.

Developers can download a free, unrestricted, copy of Sun Studio software, on the Net: http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio