Fujitsu Debuts 128-Processor Server

Fujitsu Technology Solutions Inc. this week will be the first vendor to ship a Sun Solaris-based server with 128 RISC processors inside, ahead of competitors Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems. The PrimePower server runs Solaris but is based on a different hardware architecture that includes Fujitsu's own Sparc64-GPTM processors. In one SAP benchmark test, the system set a record by performing 34,260 assembly orders per hour, nearly twice as many as its nearest rival.

Sun is having trouble getting enough of the latest UltraSparc processors from manufacturing partner Texas Instruments Inc. and might not ship its comparable StarCat system in volume until next year.

Rich Partridge, a D.H. Brown and Associates analyst, says Sun customers should look at Fujitsu's PrimePower for leverage. "To them, this is another supplier who'll run their apps faster for less money," he says. "It should help keep Sun on its toes with pricing, performance, and reliability." A fully loaded 128-processor PrimePower system will be priced at about $8 million.

Dirk Knabe, director of concept engineering R&D at systems integrator Infineon Technologies AG in Munich, Germany, doesn't see the need for 128 processors for a few years, but he already benefits from the performance and reliability he gets from Fujitsu. "The Fujitsu processors were much faster than the Sun processors," he says. "I think Fujitsu understands high-performance computing very well because they come from a mainframe heritage."