Today, Oracle announced new Sun x86 servers, based on Intel Nehalem EX (Xeon 7500 series) and Westmere processors (Xeon 5600 series). As part of the launch, roughly a dozen+ industry benchmark records were set, with Oracle Solaris Studio contributing to most of them. These records represent best-of-class performance of applications across a wide spectrum, including integer, floating point, and OpenMP enterprise workloads:
SPECint_rate2006 : Sun Fire X4800 server, with eight Intel Xeon X7560 processors. Check the BestPerf blog entry for additional details.
SPECfp_rate2006 : Sun Fire X4800 server, with eight Intel Xeon X7560 processors. Check the BestPerf blog entry for additional details.
SPECfp_base2006 : Sun Fire X4170 M2 server, with two Intel Xeon X5670 processors.
SPECint_rate2006 : Sun Fire X4470 server, with four Intel Xeon X7560 processors. Check the BestPerf blog entry for additional details.
SPECompM2001 : Sun Fire X4470 server, with four Intel Xeon X7560 processors. Check the BestPerf blog entry for additional details.
SPECompL2001 : Sun Fire X4470 server, with four Intel Xeon X7560 processors. Check the BestPerf blog entry for additional details.
SPECompM2001 : Sun Fire X2270 M2 server, with two Intel Xeon 5600 processor series CPUs
Notably, the system stack that produced these x86 industry records did not include well-known offerings in the x86 market: MS Windows, Linux, HP/IBM hardware, nor Intel or gcc compilers. Rather, apps compiled by Oracle Solaris Studio for Oracle Solaris 10 OS, running on Sun Fire x86 systems. What does that mean to you? If application performance is a requirement for your x86 systems, developing with Oracle Solaris Studio for Oracle Solaris OS-based Sun Fire x86 systems should be a configuration you consider.
Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. SPEC and the benchmark name SPEComp are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Competitive data obtained from www.spec.org as of the date located next to the respective claim. See the website for latest results. For comparison purposes, the terms CPU, chip, and processor are used interchangeably. Each socket can accommodate one chip.
Don and I taped a short video, while in Don’s office, to introduce Oracle Solaris Studio Express 6/10, our first Express release here at Oracle.
It’s been a while since I’ve been behind the camera, and admittedly, the rust shows. 
I work in the Sun Developer Tools division within Oracle, having joined via the acquisition of Sun earlier this year. As it turns out, our team had been working hard on the next release of our Studio compilers and tools product for Solaris and Linux platforms when the acquisition was completed. While many things continue to stay the same, such as our continued focus on the productivity of software developers in creating high-quality, high-performance, applications, some things did indeed change. New brand, new name, new internal processes, and more. However, the team displayed great agility and focus in delivering our first release, under Oracle, right on time.
We are pleased to announce the availability of Oracle Solaris Studio Express 6/10, which can be freely downloaded here:
http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/downloads/express/
Sun Studio Express has been renamed Oracle Solaris Studio Express. Supporting both Solaris 10 (SPARC, x86) and Linux distributions (OEL 5, RHEL 5, SuSE 11), Oracle Solaris Studio Express 6/10 will be made available on OpenSolaris in the near future. Downloads included both the package installer (SVR4, RPM) and non-package tarballs.
Highlights include the following:
- C/C++/Fortran compiler optimizations for the latest UltraSPARC and SPARC64-based architectures such as UltraSPARC T2 and SPARC64 VII
- C/C++/Fortran compiler optimizations for the latest x86 architectures including Intel® Xeon® 7500 processor series (Nehalem-EX) and 5600 processor series (Westmere-EP)
- Enhanced debugging and code coverage tooling: a new memory debugger (Discover) provides increased performance & accuracy. Other enhancements include improved debugging of optimized code (OCD), improvements to tcov, and a new code coverage tool (Uncover) which prioritizes unexercised functions.
- Improved application profiling and observability: enhancements in the Performance Analyzer include the ability to compare multiple experiment runs, new hierarchical tree view of data functionality, and profiling of shell scripts. A new stand-alone DLight observability tool is also included in the release.
- Updated IDE based on NetBeans 6.8: Oracle Solaris Studio comes with an integrated development environment (IDE) based on the award winning Netbeans IDE, tailored for use with the included compilers and the debugger. This IDE increases developer productivity with a code-aware editor, workflow, and project functionality. The updated IDE provides performance improvements to the code assistance model and new remote development functionality.
First attempt at blogging was via work- blogs.sun.com. Second attempt was here, at koberoi.com, however, my site was hacked and it started showing up as a malware attack site (according to Google). Unfortunately, as we remedied the situation, I was unable to save prior postings. So, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning proverbially quoted in Letters addressed to R. H. Horne, “The luck of the third adventure”.
Indeed, let’s hope the 3rd time is a charm!
