If Texas Instruments pulls rug on SPARC, will Sun adopteron the Opteron?

And the answer appears to be that while Solaris X86 could run on Opteron processors, the more important question would be whether Scott McNealy's company would want it to.

The firm comments that while the X86 port would run on an Opteron, but only in 32-bit mode, Sun might not wish that to happen, Jim.

Slowaris for X86 is not a strategic part of Sun's plans but it doesn't want to miss opportunities at the low end of the server market.

Isuppli's thinking is that Sun definitely does not want Solaris to run on any machine that might interfere with sales of its UltraSPARC big tin, and the Opteron might well start biting into that sector, just like Intel hopes its Itanic will do.

There's another interesting point iSuppli raises, as well. What happens if Texas Instruments, which fabs up Sun's SPARCy processors, doesn't want to make them any more, could Opteron be the chip that Scott decides to plump for? µ

L'INQ
iSuppli Web site

See Also
Sun and AMD still plotting Opteron chip revenge