upc, the articles you referenced speak about platform development. I agree that Sun is designing 4-way, and with Broadcom's support more than 4-way Opteron platforms.
Our earlier speculation here was that future Opteron (K9 and beyond) could contain technology from Sun and eventually replace SPARC throughout Sun's lineup. It was speculation based on the aging nature of the SPARC design and the fact it is falling further and further behind. Now, the quote about coherent hyperchannel could indicate technology that works on board the processor chip (although not near the core), although everything I read says that coherent hyperchannel will require an external chip to assure coherency. So this, too, sounds like a platform issue primarily.
Some things to look for in a future Opteron that can replace SPARC:
1. Integrated multiprocessing design (vs. AMD's stated plan to put multiple cores on the die).
2. Special instructions for accelerating Solaris.
3. A big-endian switch (as mips and Power have), unless Sun totally abandons this part of the code base.
We may still see these types of collaboration on future AMD cores, but the news that Sun is working on Itanium and Power ports makes it much less likely. So far the collaboration is all about platform design.
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