Andrew Tyson wrote:

> Not wanting to start a flame war - but what is Sun's thinking here?

I would assume a better product/profit margin.

> want an AMD based box why am I going to pay a premium for a x86 clone with a
> Sun badge? I gather that the Opteron is only available in Sun badged
> machines but how do Sun reconcile this product range with the USIII based
> workstations and servers? I hope that it's not the beginning of the end for
> SPARC/Sun products ...

As someone else pointed out, give the customers what they want. The
latest inclusion of the AMD boxes allows Sun to competitively target and
penetrate the low-end workstation and server market. However much we
might love the sparc platform, the truth is that X86 and X86/64 have the
biggest market share. If Sun offers these boxes, they would offer
hardware and software support as well...which is what the companies
would buy.

Honestly, if I have to buy (now or in future) an opteron machine either
from: Sun, IBM or even Dell for any use, I would prefer Sun or IBM. I
might save some money with Dell, but their product/customer support is
one of the worst in the world (http://babyurl.com/2tWPrO).

Nevertheless, if you get out of OS-evangelism, you'll see that this was
a smart move on Sun's part.

My 2 cents.

-Bruno