Note: This post was originally part of my LinuxWorld blog; now migrated here after my resignation.When I did the review of the Sun v40z, I said at the time that it was a fast machine, whether it was running Solaris or Linux. Now some more official benchmarks have come out, and it looks like the Sun v40z is an exceedingly fast little box. Some of these performance stats are amazing, most world beating for an x86 machine. I’m just glad I got to try one out. Even better, some of the stats you see use the new dual-core Opterons, giving you an 8-way SMP capable box in the same footprint as the old 4-way box. To quote from FP performance report:

On the compute intensive industry-standard SPEC CPU2000 benchmark, the Sun Fire V40z server has achieved SPECfp_rate2000 result of 138, setting a new world record for all 8-way x86-compatible systems, as of April 21, 2005. This record outshines the previous top score of 41.1, which was set by the Intel Xeon MP-based HP ProLiant DL740 server, by over 3x. The enhanced 4-socket server, equipped with the dual-core Opteron processors, demonstrates more than double the performance of the single-core 4-socket competitive servers outfitted with the newest Intel Xeon MP EM64T-capable family of processors. Specifically, Sun Fire V40z server tops the performance of HP ProLiant ML570 G3 and Dell PowerEdge 6850 servers (52.6 and 52.5 respectively) by over 2.5x on the floating point throughput test.

This fits in line with the press release announcing support for the dual-core Opteron support. OK, the stats are Solaris, not Linux, based, but this box is just as capable of running Linux (I tried Fedora Core 3 x64 without any issues for over a month). I can’t see any reason why Linux, Fedora or otherwise, couldn’t achieve similar results if given the opportunity. Now all I need to do is find the money to buy one…