Intel and Sun partner up.

sudden.zero writes: "After spending years apart, Sun Microsystems and Intel have agreed to team up. In an announcement just a day before it's due to release it latest quarterly results, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz told an audience in San Francisco on Jan. 22 that his company would produce new Xeon-based x86 servers and workstation by later in 2007. In turn, Intel announced that it would now support Sun's Solaris operating system and would encourage ISVs (independent software providers) to support Solaris on Xeon platforms, thus giving Sun access to a much broader audience. The agreement also means that Intel will also support open-source communities from Sun, including OpenSolaris, open Java and NetBeans. While the benefits to a collaborative effort between Sun and Intel are obvious, the agreement is also seen as a blow to Advanced Micro Devices, which had been an exclusive provider of x86 server processors — Opteron — to Sun for the past several years. The agreement now also places Sun on the same playing field as other top x86 server providers such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell, which offer both AMD and Intel processors in their respective server products. This makes the deal between Intel and Sun a win-win deal for both companies, said Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata, in Nashua, N.H. see the full story here"