Sun and AMD Celebrate Year of Strategic Partnership

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (sun.com) and AMD (www.amd.com) today announced that one year into their burgeoning strategic partnership, the companies continue to dramatically change market dynamics.

Most recently this was shown with the debut of the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) optimized for AMD64 Technology and enterprise computing at Sun's quarterly Network Computing '04 launch. To date, Sun has delivered the most comprehensive AMD processor-based systems family in the industry.

In a November 2004 Forrester Research report entitled, "Solaris 10 - Major Value for Sun Customers," Forrester Vice President Richard Fichera states, "A cornerstone of the announcement is full support for Solaris on x86 architectures, with a focus on support for Sun's own family of AMD Opteron-based servers . . . benefits to Sun customers are significant.

"The results of AMD's strategic partnership with Sun have exceeded our expectations, as well as those of the industry," said Dirk Meyer, executive vice president, AMD Computation Products Group.

"We will be using the Sun Java Workstation W2100z on AMD Opteron processors for research on robotics, security, digital mapping and any projects requiring 64-bit computing," said David Livingston, associate director of computer science research, Carnegie Mellon University.

Access to Sun's Software Express for Solaris program is also enabling early previews of the ground-breaking new technologies in Solaris 10 and priming the market for the company's channel partner communities and customers to leverage Solaris 10 on Sun's low-cost, high-volume x86 systems.