Intel supplies chips to Sun, endorses operating system

Sun Microsystems Inc. will build a line of servers that run on chips from Intel Corp. and will receive Intel’s endorsement of Sun’s Solaris operating system, both companies said Monday.

The long-term alliance, announced by Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz and Intel CEO Paul Otellini, is seen as a sizable victory for both companies as they fend off rivals in the high-margin server market.

Sun, which plans to begin shipping the Intel-based products in the first half of this year, said the companies were working on ways to improve Solaris and extend its popularity.

Both executives stressed the collaborative nature of the deal, which teamed up two companies known for heavy investment in research and development.

The deal marks a major win for Intel. The world’s largest chip maker has been fighting to reverse plunging profit and regain market share lost to Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

For the last few years, Sun has relied exclusively on AMD chips for servers based on the popular x86 architecture used in many personal computers and servers.

Intel once provided chips to Sun for those systems, but they were said to consume too much energy and were pushed aside in favor of AMD’s offerings. Now, Intel will again place its chips in those servers.

Analysts said Sun should get a major boost from Intel’s endorsement of Solaris because many servers based on the x86 design often ran rival operating systems such as Linux and Microsoft Corp.’s Windows.