Sun Announces New AMD-Based Product Line

Transfan76 writes "Today Sun Microsystems has officially announced an alliance with AMD. They "have formed an alliance to deliver a broad range of AMD Opteron[tm] processor-based systems, Sun also announced it plans to offer its Java Enterprise System on the AMD Opteron processor and is significantly extending the reach of its Solaris Operating System (OS) and leadership in the 64-bit space." You can read the official press release from Sun here. And the AMD release here." We previously reported rumored plans to this effect a few days back.

Comments

Who Knowns

[Anonymous Coward]

The Java Desktop they could create some serious revenue. Imagine a large company with Opteron workstation for engineering and scientific appilcations and SunRays as e-mail/web/StarOffice boxes.

Sun, the company who is now renowed for their expensive systems could use "commodity" computing to bring themselves back and Linux to the desktop. Who would have thought.

IBM and now Sun

[Euphonious Coward]

With IBM shipping Opteron boxes, and now Sun announcing, it seems the Opteron architecture probably has legs. When HP announces, all doubt will fade.

(If you never had doubts about Opteron's ultimate prospects, consider Alpha. It had more going for it than Opteron ever did, and generations earlier. Current Alphas (EV7 and EV79) are fully competitive with current Opteron and Itanium, even without a proper engineering team for several years, yet the Alpha is "dead".)

Intel could do a lot worse than to revive it. It may need to, to stay competitive with Opteron.

Excellent!

[painehope]

The AMD64 ( or x86-64, whatever we're calling it this week ) architecture is very promising, and Sun is still an excellent vendor ( despite numerous blunders...they've made some horrible mistakes, but they've also had some great successes ).
This has the potential to breathe new life into both vendors, and gives us all an alternative, which is important in a marketplace that has such a dynamic history but is currently being choked to death by certain vendors that think marketing is more important than quality.
Now who should I get my next worksation from, IBM w/ SUSE or RHWS, or Sun w/ their desktop Linux stack? Hmm...

Re:Why AMD?

[oldmanmtn]

There probably isn't a whole lot of reason to not choose Intel, other than the fact that Sun operates on religious principles rather than business ones.

Opteron is cheaper, faster, and requires less power than Itanium. AMD's 64-bit ISA is a hell of a lot cleaner than Itanic's. And AMD appears to be making the switch to 90nm technology faster and better than Intel, which will further help their power/cooling story.