But Sun is also working on its low-end UltraSparc-based products, in particular its Niagara offering. Niagara is an eight-core, multithreaded UltraSparc chip that will be offered as an alternative to x86 platforms. Sun also open-sourced its Solaris platform, and has been especially interested in seeing it used on x86 systems.

Sun is also telling customers that it is continuing to invest in high-end UltraSparc systems; last week, it announced that it was on schedule to release its , which is designed for databases and other memory-intensive workloads, by mid-2008.