I normally don't pay much attention to Sun any more as by most accounts, they have been steadily going the way of the Ottoman Empire in recent years.
But when they come out with a 4 processor AMD Opteron rackmount server aimed (at least in part) at the high end Linux server market it's kind of hard to ignore, particularly when you look at some of it's performance benchmarks.
Some choice morsels from the bunch: with 8 gigs of PC2700, this box can support 25000 (yep, that's twenty five thousand) simultaneous apache queries per second. Or how about compiling a 2.4 kernel in under 5 minutes?
Provided you've got the IT budget for it, it can be yours for just over $20k. IF Sun can reliably crank out this kind of hardware, and IF they can convince the appropriate class of end users to buy it, reports of their impending demise may yet prove to be premature. To be sure, cheap commodity hardware in the $5k range can do alot, but most of it still can't perform at this level.
