Is Intel still using a memory controller chip that draws 20watts at idle?

To Christopher's point, how is a Sun 8-way beating 4-ways from Dell news? Shouldn't it scale even better than what Sun is touting?

I'd like to see the cost of the Dell servers vs. the Sun..

The X4600 is an awesome machine, ideal as a vmware platform IMO, can any other vendor offer a 32 core machine, with 256GB in a 4U chassis? 

I think not

Ive heard the base config is quite cheap, like 10.000 USD. Then you could add in your own pace, in total 8 quad core + 512 GB RAM. And you could just switch the CPU boards to the newer CPUs that come later. It is modularized built.

For the old model (8 dual core) one of the them booted WS2003 in like 5 secs. And virtualized 30 servers with middle to high workload, without problems. 

Now imagine this beast with 8 quad cores instead. You could run lots of SunRay thin clients that uses 4W each, on one of these, and throw out all desktops. The SunRay has no cpu nor RAM that executes programs, everything is executed on the server. The SunRay sends input and receives bitmaps from the server. Impossible to upgrade the 249 USD SunRay. That would be lots of SunRays, running Linux or Solaris or Windows.... :o)

What no comments on what you think of this? This sounds like you copied their press release.
Come on, where's the snarky comments or at least point out the holes in the article.

...the R900 is a quad-cord machine, so I would expect it to have only about half the power. And if you compare the Sun box with the R900 you compared Opteron to Xeon.

Later the article suddenly said R905 which would be the Opteron version of the R90x - again just 4 sockets with 4x4 cores max.

In my opinion both machines aim at different parts of the market or even at different markets as the R90x machines are thought for virtualization. If you want to use 'Distributed Power Management' with VMWare ESX you are probably better of with the R90x unless you run some really mean VMs on them.