Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[chipdesigner]

Sounds like the Kealia Opteron boxes are going to be quite impressive.

"We believe that Sun may publish benchmarks that show its servers (both pizza boxes and blades) running a commodity microprocessor and OS at 2-3X the speed of current x86 systems thanks to the non-commodity architecture built around the parts," the analyst firm wrote in the report. "Running Solaris rather than Red Hat would probably provide an additional performance boost. Sun's value added would be in the design of the board, the I/O, and raw performance. If 3X performance is achieved, then a data center could save significantly on A/C, electricity, and real estate."

These performance projections may sound nuts, but Sun really believes that its new Opteron gear along with its Thumper project will give it a big competitive advantage. If the performance is all Sun claims, customers may well pick Solaris x86 over Linux. And, as has been discussed before, Solaris sales are worth much more than Linux sales to Sun.