INDUSTRY

SANTA CLARA, -- As the compute-intensive demands of technical markets increase, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) continues innovating to meet the market's mission-critical needs for high performance, reliability and scalability through developing faster, more powerful workstations and servers at competitive price points. As a result, Sun holds the number one position for technical computing revenue generated (workstations and technical computing servers combined) in 2001, according to IDC's Technical Systems and Servers, 2001Year in Review bulletin and Q4CY01 Worldwide Personal and Traditional Workstation Trackers. Bolstered by its workstations sales, and five years of strong growth in its technical systems revenue, Sun today leads the technical workstation and systems market. Sun's Volume System Products Offer Technical Markets Technology Innovation and Highly Competitive Entry Price Points IDC's results clearly put Sun in the driver's seat of the workstation and technical computing market, with Sun leading in revenue for seven of the last eight years. Sun's commitment to technical computing has led to a number of innovations, including Sun Grid Engine, Sun's distributed resource management software, and the newly announced high performance Sun Blade 2000 workstation. The Sun Blade 2000 workstation is the first of Sun's end-to-end product line to employ the 1.05 Ghz UltraSPARC Cu processor, the first 64-bit chip in a workstation to break the Ghz barrier. In addition, Sun's ability to deliver enterprise-class capabilities and performance with its entry-level servers, including the hot-selling eight-way Sun Fire V880 server, is helping technical market customers solve their compute-intensive requirements at Wintel-competitive price points. The power of Sun's proven 64-bit architecture and robust UltraSPARC® and Solaris(TM) Operating Environment provide mission-critical solutions with massive scalability and lower total cost of ownership. To deliver savings through investment protection, Sun systems deliver industry-leading application availability and a fully compatible product line, from the entry-level Sun Blade(TM) 100 workstation to the Sun Fire(TM) 15K server. Sun's Midframe Servers Solidify Lead in High Performance Computing Sun's Sun Fire (TM) server line (3800, 4800, 4810, 6800 and F15K) continues to bolster Sun's lead in high performance computing, offering customers the flexibility, expandability and reliability of the SPARC/Solaris platform with unmatched price/performance. According to IDC's Technical Systems and Servers, 2001 Year in Review bulletin, Sun controlled the technical divisional server market revenues for the year, climbing from fifth place in 2000 to the top spot in 2001. Sun holds a significant 10-point lead over its nearest competitor in the market, Compaq, and a 17-point lead over IBM. Sun Fire 6800 Delivers Best Midrange Performance on the SPEC OMP2001 Benchmark Further proof of Sun's strength in the HPC and technical computing markets, the Sun Fire 6800 Midframe server, featuring the Solaris Operating Environment and 900 MHz UltraSPARC III Cu processors, delivered the fastest 8-way, 16-way and 24-way results running the SPEC OMP2001 benchmark. In a 16-way test, the Sun Fire 6800 beat out its nearest competitors SGI and HP, by 27 percent and 39 percent, respectively. ``Sun's rise in the HPTC market over the last five years has been phenomenal and that is absolutely a testament to Sun's exceptional products,'' said Steve Campbell, senior director, Sun's Enterprise Systems Products. ``The scalability and the efficiency of the Sun Fire 6800 server is unmatched, due to its high performance SMP design along with additional features and functionalities that are not found in our competitors' systems.'' SPEC OMP2001, which provides compute-intensive parallel workloads, illustrates the server's success in handling high performance computing (HPC) and scientific applications and provides the HPC community with the most objective and representative benchmark suite for measuring the performance of symmetric (shared-memory) multiprocessor (SMP) systems. SMP is the processing of programs by multiple processors that share a common operating system and memory. Designed to provide performance measurements that can be used to compare compute-intensive parallel workloads on different parallel computing systems, SPEC OMP2001 measures the performance of the computing system's processors, memory architecture, operating system and compiler. For further information visit www.sun.com