'Intel is hoping in 2007 they will get to two cores. We are shipping eight cores, 32 threads, this year,' McNealy said.

The new processor, code-named Niagara, will be designed to consume just two watts per thread on a 32-thread, eight-core chip, compared to Intel's Xeon processor which consumes 60 to 100 watts per thread. 'That's 30 times price-performant,' he said.

'We'd be doing a lot of Intel right now, except that Opteron is way faster and way lower power, and way lower cost and way more scalable than Xeon. That's not my fault. I'm not picking on Intel. At different times Sun hasn't been price-performant. Intel is not price-performant right now, they know it, in the server space,' he added.

McNealy challenged Intel to respond to Niagara. 'Now they all better respond to Niagara, because when you have 32 threads on a single piece of silicon, that's pretty small. I've actually got one in my notebook there, I'll show you. It runs in 60 to 70 watts. They all better respond to that.'

Aside from announcing the new Sun Fire servers, McNealy also ushered in what the company calls 'the age of participation.'