What benefits will software developers see from Suns investment in the AMD Opteron architecture?
Having an optimized 64-bit implementation of Solaris for the AMD Opteron architecture opens up the possibility to build new applications exploiting the linear 64-bit address space—something that has previously not been feasible on 32-bit x86 systems. In addition, the 64-bit kernel has guaranteed compatibility with existing x86 32-bit binaries.