September 5, 2006; 04:26 AM
Sun Microsystems, Inc. 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
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
A
singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer" -- guides Sun in the
development of technologies that power the world's most important
markets. Sun's philosophy of sharing innovation and building
communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the
Participation Age. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on
the Web at http://sun.com .
Sun,
Sun Microsystems, the Sun Logo, Java, Solaris, Sun Fire, UltraSPARC,
Sun Studio, NetBeans 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 US and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based
upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. SPEC, SPECfp
and SPECint are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance
Evaluation Corporation. Competitive benchmark results stated above
reflect results published on www.spec.org as of 8/24/2006. For the latest SPEC CPU2006 benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2006 .