I forgot to add... we have nearly 700 Unix/Linux servers...

For actual server names, we use 3 character prefixes to denote use (prd, dev, ttf for tech test facility, vrf for verfication, etc), then 2 chars for os type (lx for linux, ai for aix, ux for hp-ux and sx for solaris), then a 3 digit sequence that is unique across each use... prdux001, prdai007, etc.

rather uninteresting to be sure... but not something we had a choice in due to constraints by management

so... when we started to get partitionable 'frames', such as Power4/5/6 frames by IBM, or our Sun 12Ks, we started naming them after 'imaginary locations', such as Minis Tirith, Romulus, Vulcan, etc... usually centered on Star Trek, Star Wards, LoTR, etc...

Of course, one person named a frame Alpha Centauri, and had to be clued in that that wasn't an imaginary place....

so now the flood gates have opened and we have Gorgo and Arlen and Quahog, etc

Excellent point! Depends on what the meaning of the word "core" is, to paraphrase a former president.

IBM's Power4 came out years ago as "dual core" on the same chip. Little fan fare. The cores share L3 cache (now they're all doing that too), but little else, and you really got 2X+ performance from their multi-core implementation.

I believe Sun implemented (questionable word here) dual core in enough of a different way so that you really get less than 2X performance over a comparable speed single core chip. I do know that BEA charges us about 1.7X price on a socket-to-socket comparison, so that says a little about what they think the relative performance is. But I digress.

Our Sun rep was kind enough to point out a recent TPC-H metric that had Sun beating IBM in raw performance by 5%, but I don't think he caught the details in the footnotes, which I tend to gravitate to.

To summarize my observation:

After raw performance, if you take cost into account (and who doesn't?), IBM is the less expensive option. And that 5% raw performance increase comes at the expense of 12.5% more CPUs (72 vs. 64). And if we're counting "cores", then IBM's is still 64-way, but Sun's jumps to 144... so if you have other s/w that's licensed by core that you want to run on that same box, well, do the math.