John Lim from PHPEverywhere has posted a new set of benchmarks today using a Sun Fire E20K Server as a PHP-enabled web server.

Recently I was able to measure the performance of a Sun Fire E20K Server as a PHP web server using apache bench (ab). The E20K can house multiple processor cards, and we were allocated one 4-CPU card for this testing. As these Sparc CPUs are dual core, the processor card has actually 8 CPUs. One of these babies costs nearly half a million US dollars. Not cheap!

[...] It's interesting to see that a server farm running 4 servers with dual Intel CPUs would run faster and probably cost less than USD 20K, including a load balancer and a spare server in case of hardware failure. Also SPARC processor speed is nothing to boast about.

I guess this is just a bit more proof that just throwing more hardware at something as a solution isn't always the best choice. Of course, he does mention what the E20K would be good for - a very effective database server where you need everything centrally synchronized in shared memory - especially when running a big database with 1000+ users with many concurrent transactions reading and writing to the database.