Sun may be stepping on their own foot, since their market is typically a smaller, higher-performance server market. It seems they won't be offering Opteron HTX support in a new line of AMD-based servers that they are offering. HTX is a peripheral connector that allows certain devices to be given direct access to memory and CPU via HyperTransport, rather than through the standard I/O bus, allowing the card to get much more impressive memory throughput and lower latencies. Sun doesn't see it as a big deal, though, with the "giving up" of other resources too big of an impact to make room for the AMD-only technology. Sun is apparently the only Opteron vendor to be doing this, so they are definitely setting themselves up to either strike gold or be trampled down by other Opteron server providers. Or, they could be correct, and the impact insignificant. Let's hope for Sun that they continue to offer Sun reliability, if not performance.