IBM and Sun to use AMD Motherboards?

TheRaven64 writes: "The Register is reporting that IBM is planning on using AMD Opteron motherboards for the POWER 7 and Sun is considering following suit. This is not entirely surprising, since both IBM and Sun are members of the HyperTransport Consortium, the industry group the specifies the mechanism used for interfacing with AMD's recent CPUs. This could dramatically lower the barrier to entry for people wishing to build a RISC workstation, and make it as easy to migrate between CPU families as it was to move between x86 CPU suppliers back in the Socket 7 days.

It is worth noting that Intel is pursuing a similar strategy by themselves, with plans for the Xeon and Itanium to be socket-compatible."