Bull SAS, a major French provider of IT equipment and services, is claiming victory in the race to build the most powerful server based on Intel x86 architecture.

Its server called bullion scored highest among the top-performing x86 systems by HP, Fujitsu, Oracle, IBM and Cisco in a test conducted using a benchmark developed by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) – an international non-profit organization that develops standardized benchmarks for measuring computer performance.

The bullion system tested had 160 Intel Xeon E7 cores and four terabytes of RAM. It achieved peak performance of 4,100 on the SPEC CINT2006 scale.

To put things in perspective, the second-fastest system used in the test was made by HP and peaked at 2,180. It was followed, in descending order, by Fujitsu, Oracle, IBM and Cisco.

Here are performance figures of all six systems published by Bull:

In addition to performance, bullion’s distinctive feature is its native use of VMware technology. One such unit supports more than 500 virtual machines and lends itself well to application and database consolidation, according to Bull.

Several companies and government bodies have deployed bullion systems, primarily in Europe, Africa and Brazil.

Bull is a major supplier of IT systems to defense organizations around the world, including, through its subsidiary Amesys, Internet traffic surveillance systems to the administration of Lybia’s late dictator Moammar Gadhafi, according to a report by Wired.

The regime reportedly used technology supplied by Amesys to gain access to all data traffic going through Lybia’s Internet system to spy on dissidents and political opponents.

Amesys made the Lybia deal in 2007, before its acquisition by Bull in 2010. In March of this year, Bull announced it would sell the activities of Amesys relating to Eagle, the software system the subsidiary sold to Lybia.