I took a "C" class last year and wrote a program that created a dynamic array from a file. one of the files had 255K words, the program did an insert in ordedr with a binary search. On my Centrino Duo it ran in 2 minutes 10 seconds, on my dual core Debian box it ran in one minute 37 seconds. I compiled the same code for Solaris 10 and after 12 minutes it was still running.

I would have to agree with Jeff with his comments about Sun. Where I work, we are in the process of migrating towards Dell boxes.