Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[yourbankruptcy]

Elmer, the stupid thing is that Sparc itself is just a small part of what Sun has. They are not in cpu business. Sparc is just a helper, a sideeffect of their business. The only thing holding Sun with Sparc is binary compatibility and unique instruction set that makes the whole Sun infrostructure a small universe, where many customers live.

I think Solaris and server experience are still distinctive enough to keep Sun running. Adoption of x86 instruction set is painful, but once done, will keep them going. The hardware they make is still distinctive enough to prevent succesful cloning. Noone will buy IBM servers to install Solaris on them.

What makes Opteron strongly preferable to Sun is the total control on the HT bus they have. This way they can keep Opteron as just a processing unit inside the server. The way Intel bus works, technically and legally, is that cpu becomes the core the whole computer is build around. There is nothing that can prevent Sun from having anyone to clone their computers, as they never will have more control on the cpu bus than anyone who has a license. Or even doesn't.

Well, that's my impression.