Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[HailMary]

Sun knows the DAY sunw ports Solaris to X86 is the day they are out of the hardware business.

Not necessarily. They might be out of the chip business, but there are a lot of system architecture issues that Sun is very good at where they can add a lot of value. They can be more than just a clone with this model. I expect them to start making large Opteron MP machines that no other OEM will have, and they could charge big $$$ because there would be no competition. Being out of the chip business might not be a bad thing for them either. There is so much fixed cost associated with chip making that it just doesn't make sense to carry on with the low volume sparc.