Why did you discontinue those Intel products? Before they (Intel) came out with Woodcrest, their prior products were not at all performance competitive with AMD. Because we were just starting out in the business, we decided to concentrate our engineering and marketing resources around AMD and that's been very successful for us. Now we're at a stage where adding Intel is a very logical thing to do -- especially since their technology has improved dramatically.

One of the things Intel wants is to expand the reach of x86 in enterprise markets that Sun has a heavy share of, and that includes financial services and telecommunications. What do you think of that? It sounds as if they are trying to take some of your UltraSparc market. They are always going to want to do that. But the reality of it is if Intel is going to take my UltraSparc market I'd rather it be in the product I sell as opposed to somebody else's. Sparc is doing extremely well on its own. It doesn't make a difference whether I sell Intel or not.

Do you see, as a result of this agreement, development of Intel-based servers that can compete with your high-end UltraSparcs? There is nothing presently planned here that's at that same scale. Obviously, in the lower parts of the range they've always been competitive with UltraSparc and that doesn't seem to matter. Sparc still does quite well.

Is there any reason why your UltraSparc customers should be nervous about where Sun's research and development efforts are going to be focused? No, they are seeing a constant raft of new products; We just taped-out (for final design) Rock, which is the new high-end processor, and we also said Niagara 2 is on track, which is the next generation Niagara processor for delivery in volume in the second half of this year. So the Sparc customers are seeing regular updates on a whole range of technologies so they know what's actually going on.