AMD announced that its Operating System Research Center (OSRC) has expanded its focus to include optimization and tuning advancements for Sun Microsystems’ OpenSolaris Operating System and Sun xVM Virtualization family of products. This extends AMD’s commitment to work together with technology software partners to ensure that their OS and virtualization software layers are optimized to leverage AMD processor-based platforms’ features. By expanding research and development on the OpenSolaris Operating System, the ORSC expects to help drive increased Solaris OS performance for business customers as well as feature enhancements on AMD Opteron processor-based systems.

“Sun and AMD share a long history of technology collaboration. This next step at the OSRC represents an even deeper commitment on the part of both companies to ensure that our respective technologies work in concert to deliver customers the highest performance possible on our systems,” said Earl Stahl, vice president, Software Development, AMD. “We know that Solaris is a key enterprise-class OS for mission critical applications while the xVM family of products addresses desktop and server virtualization for the enterprise and data center with high availability, scalability, performance and management. AMD is a strong supporter of open source and will be a contributing member of the OpenSolaris community.”

“A critical factor in the success of the new OpenSolaris OS release and xVM will be their ability to run and perform exceptionally well on any system. Sun and AMD are committed to further optimizing these products for AMD Operton processor-based systems,” said Jim McHugh, vice president of Solaris Marketing at Sun Microsystems. “AMD has long been a leader in processor innovation and we're excited to take this next step in better aligning our technologies and ultimately meeting customer needs.”

The readily-available Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor is engineered to work with the full library of Sun software, including OpenSolaris, Sun Studio compilers and tools, xVM and Java technology. SunFire systems powered by AMD Opteron processors have achieved numerous world-record benchmarks in conjunction with the Solaris operating system and these technologies together deliver an outstanding combination for enterprise, workstation and HPC environments.