"Over the past year we've made a dramatic move in leveraging industry economics to bring customers the enterprise-class benefits of our Solaris OS and Java technology at compelling price points," said Scott McNealy, chairman and chief executive officer for Sun Microsystems, Inc. "This means that Sun customers can now get all the benefits of Solaris OS, Linux and Java technologies running on their choice of UltraSPARC and x86 systems. With the addition of the AMD Opteron processor, we are setting a new industry standard by delivering even more choice and performance to our customers."

Sun said the new Sun Fire servers provide all customers with the performance benefits of AMD processors. The company addeed that offering both Solaris OS and Linux gives Sun customers a choice of enterprise operating systems and access to thousands of applications.

"Today's agreement with Sun is a strong validation of AMD's growing customer acceptance inside the enterprise," said Hector Ruiz, president and CEO of AMD. "The combination of Sun's network computing expertise and the AMD Opteron processor platform will allow IT customers unprecedented flexibility and scalability. Sun's support adds additional momentum to our growing AMD Opteron processor ecosystem."

The partnership includes plans to collaborate on joint technology development, the companies said.