Sun Microsystems has extended its Solaris operating system to take advantage of Intel's newly launched Xeon processor 5500 series.

The company has released details of its work to optimise Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris to take advantage of the dual-socket server and workstation system chipset from Intel's Nehalem EP range.

Sun claimed that Solaris-based systems using the new chips will be able to automatically access Intel's QuickPath Interconnect, Turbo Boost and Hyper-Threading technologies to improve system performance and scalability.

Updated Solaris Containers, meanwhile, will build on the micro-architecture enhancements in the Xeon 5500 to cut the overheads associated with integrated virtualisation.

Sun's Solaris Power Aware Dispatcher tool now uses Intel's new Deep C-States to reduce the power consumed by idle cores and help dynamically optimise system performance and consumption.

The two companies have also worked to implement Intel's PowerTop functionality for Solaris DTrace dynamic tracing framework, which will let developers and administrators see where applications may be preventing part of a system from going into power-saving mode. It can also monitor how effectively a system is taking advantage of Intel Turbo Boost and other processor power-management features.

Tony Lock, programme director at analyst firm Freeform Dynamics, said that the announcement is good news for both Intel and Sun.

"The important thing for Intel was to have Solaris on this chipset from day one. It offers an alternative to Windows and Linux, while allowing Solaris to make more inroads into the x86 market and away from Sparc," he said.

Also today, IBM unveiled a new generation of Intel Xeon processor 5500 series-based System x servers and software, which it said would deliver higher performance, simplified management and increased utilisation.

IBM's four new x86 rack servers and blades boast double the compute performance in some models, and support more memory, storage and I/O intensive applications for lower-cost virtualisation.

New management software to complement IBM Systems Director 6.1 has been designed to enable the automatic management of virtual and physical assets across platforms.

Sun said that it is also planning a major hardware systems launch on 14 April.