AMD wins support from Sun

AMD continues to make news on a number of fronts. The company has recently increased the top clock speed of some Opteron models to 2.2GHz, which matches the clockspeed of the Athlon 64 FX. AMD has now decided to build another fab in the historic city of Dresden, Germany. This fab will complement Fab 30, which is currently producing millions of Athlon XP, Opteron, and Athlon 64 microprocessors. AMD will apparently spend US$2.8 billion on the new fab, which should employ thousands of Germans. Since AMD currently has only about $1.08 billion cash on hand, it will probably incur massive long-term debts from the German Government to pay for the rest of the costs. AMD has also convinced Sun to unveil a series of Opteron-based computers. This is somewhat surprising, since Sun has repeatedly boasted of its UltraSPARC processors. Apparently, the UltraSPARC III is simply too expensive to use in anything but high-end servers, and the UltraSPARC IIIi isn't competitive at only 1GHz. This may be an indication that Sun will soon drop the UltraSPARC IIIi, and use only the Opteron for its low-end and midrange models.