With Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems a done deal, industry observers are now speculating on what Sun’s new owner will do with its x86 server lineup, which currently comes with either Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron configurations. Some see Oracle’s silence on the subject as an indication that it’s poised to dump the AMD option and simplify its Sun server offerings.
If true, it’s both a blow to AMD and a validation of Intel’s efforts at revving up its Xeon line — efforts that Oracle itself has gone some way to highlight. ServerWatch takes a look at the evidence.
Now that the honeymoon is over between Oracle and Sun Microsystems, some pruning is starting to take place, and AMD’s Opteron processor may be one of the first victims.
Sun is known for its UltraSparc family of RISC processors, which compete against Intel’s high-end Xeon x86 processors. In recent years, Sun adopted both Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) Xeon’s and AMD (NYSE: AMD) Opteron server processors, an acknowledgment of the dominance (and customer demand) of x86 in the server world.