What does IBM have? A promise to ship something (quantity and pricing unknown) two years from now...
It was an open bid for a future high-speed system, and IBM won it. It's not about what's available now, it's about what can be installed in 2010, and that is slated to have over three times the clock speed as the UltraSPARC T2. It looks like what Sun has now and the upcoming IBM will have about the same density, although the IBM system will be doing half the number of systems (1 2U IBM = 2 1U Sun).
I am wondering about how the architecture approaches will compare. The Sun has 8 cores on a chip, 8 threads each. The IBM separates it out a bit, 8 cores per chip, 4 threads each, two chips per module.
This is a joke, right? According to the top500.org website, the site that lists the top 500 supercomputers in the world every 6 months, IBM owns 41.8% of the list, compared to SUN's 0.8%.
Most of IBM's systems on the list are running POWER architecture, while all of SUN's are running AMD Opteron. IBM's Power architecture, which includes the Cell processor, is clearly superior today, and IBM will continue to dominate tomorrow with POWER7.