was easy to build on our common approaches to engineering and move forward.”

Equally true is that at the time, both AMD and Sun had what Wagner characterizes as “a little bit of an underdog mentality. We both knew this was a David-and-Goliath battle in many, many ways. That thinking also meant that the companies aligned very

demands, according to Murdock. What the AMD/Sun alliance facilitates, Murdock asserts, is “our collective ability to understand the market in terms of how we can bring technology to bear and the opportunities we have for optimizing both the underlying processor architecture and the operating system together.”

“We can focus on entire solutions, and we’re in a position to provide customers with choice and flexibility.”

—ian murdock, Vp for deVeloper community marketing

Sun microSyStemS

well then, and we still align well today.”

And today that alignment means that the relationship—much like the underlying technologies with which the companies work cooperatively—has evolved into what Wagner says are both literally and figuratively “more cores, more threads and more ways to extend current architectures.”

Those additional—and evolving—cores, threads and extensions, apart from their processor underpinnings, are also manifesting themselves in a broad and deep understanding of fast-morphing customer

“It all continues to come down to engineering efforts and how those can be brought to bear,” Murdock says, “but it also means that the products of cooperation can be pushed up the computing stack and into different environments.”

Among those new environments and frames of reference in which Sun/AMD coengineered solutions are paying dividends now are categories such as virtualization, power management and infrastructure manageability, Wagner says.

“The green issues, the low-power issues,

the efficiency-of-use issues all are a natural evolution,” Wagner says. “And as we go forward, the developer community’s inputs and what we learn from our developer outreach efforts are teaching us how to make the most of what we collectively have to offer.”

In terms of what the companies have to offer, the alliance is unique, in Wagner’s view, in that Sun “is in the unique position of providing complete solutions from the platforms, the operating system through the applications and on through to the storage. It’s a complete open source stack. That’s unique, and that’s a big advantage for both companies.”

Murdock elaborates on Wagner’s thesis, noting that “as a systems company, Sun is investing in the entire stack, and we have to look at it at all levels. For AMD and Sun, the advantage is that an open platform isn’t just something we provide; it’s also something that’s integrated into all of the pieces. We can focus on entire solutions, and we’re in a position to provide customers with choice and flexibility—and it’s choice and flexibility that customers have told us they need.”

Why the effort? “We think we’ve got the right products and the right technologies at the right time,” Wagner says, “but when you’ve got that underdog mentality, it’s not easy to let up.” n

GrowinG Pains overcome, what’s next?

With AMD and Sun Microsystems having presided over the inception of an alliance that has drawn customers including the likes of database vendors, ERP providers, government institutions and a panoply of commercial enterprises worldwide, is it time to rest on hard-earned laurels?

Not so, according to Kevin Wagner, AMD’s director of the Sun Software Global Alliance. “This is really the time when we need to go forward,” he says. “One of the big ways that’s going to happen is through dedicated efforts we are planning that are intended to focus on the evolution of Solaris as well as new features that can be integrated into existing offerings.

“There is so much that customers are looking for in terms of virtualization, power management, manageability and lots of other areas,” Wagner continues. “This is where our existing work with the Sun Solaris and Sun Studio teams will enable us to weigh in specifically in several ways, particularly in terms of the directions features should take for the future.”

For his part, Ian Murdock, Sun vice president for developer community marketing, agrees that the paramount challenge facing both companies is to “continue to understand a changing market.” Besides the fact that Sun and AMD have been “bringing technologies to bear that address current needs, there are many, many

opportunities for us to collectively optimize both the underlying architectures and the operating system simultaneously. We always need to be looking ahead.”

Wagner and Murdock agree that the future will borrow heavily from past joint efforts. As Murdock says, “It all began with engineering, and it will continue to come down to engineering. Customer environments are changing, customer demands are changing and we need to keep pushing innovation up the systems stack. Working together, we’ve done well with our engineering focus, and that will continue.” To that end, both Sun xVM and Sun Solaris 10 Update 5—particularly with an eye toward AMD Opteron™ processor enhancements—will be coming in for attention.

For his part, Wagner reaffirmed that open source projects will remain at AMD’s forefront. “With OpenSolaris, there’s so much room to add new features and to find new ways to contribute to the customer and developer communities.”

And at the end of the day, Murdock and Wagner agree that, as Wagner puts it, “open source products drive competition. AMD and Sun both believe that open source products allow the market to decide.”

What’s the final measure of customer acceptance? “When it comes down to that, let the best technologies win,” Wagner says.

38 june 2008 // AMD AccelerAte