Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

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I would say you may be confusing the goals of the software and hardware divisions of Sun. There is still a benefit to offering Solaris on hardware platforms that Sun does not sell, like Power.

Whether or not Sun is directly assisting in the design of the K9, it seems clear they are heavily invested in developing Opteron enterprise infrastructure, and have said as much. Here are two examples, one from the partnership launch, one from last month.

http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2003-11/sunflash.20031117.1.html

Future AMD Opteron Processor-based designs: Sun and AMD will collaborate on a portfolio of future AMD Opteron processor-based systems and scalability beyond 4-way AMD Opteron processor systems. The parties will also collaborate on coherent HyperTransport technology implementations.


http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040601/cltu051_1.html

"The Broadcom-AMD partnership is a critical aspect of the AMD Opteron processor ecosystem that Sun is helping to develop," said John Fowler, Executive Vice President, Network Systems at Sun Microsystems, Inc. "We are pleased to see Broadcom join AMD as one of Sun's long-term partners in the server space."

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