Sun Dousing SPARC?

Although this is a beneficial play for AMD, we doubt it's enough to save Sun. Its past forays into x86 versions of Solaris have resulted in substandard implementations and repeated departures from the market. We are still not sure if Sun really is committed this time. Sun has always laid claim to the 64-bit high ground with its proprietary chips, and it's a dramatic departure for it to adopt another 64-bit architecture. In the past, Sun's bigotry against anything not running on SPARC hardware left its x86 efforts lacking. If Sun can engender enough internal change to make its efforts in x86-64 on the Opteron meaningful, it will find a solid market.

For AMD it's a coup. It already has IBM onboard, and the Sun deal will increase pressure on Hewlett-Packard and Dell to produce similar systems to compete. Even if Sun's effort on the Opteron fails, AMD still gets to sell more chips and gain greater corporate acceptance.

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