Sun Microsystems and AMD have signed a deal which will see Sun shipping AMD Opteron processor-based Sun Fire systems loaded with versions of its Solaris, Java or Linux.

The companies also plan to include long-term joint technology development to create future hardware and software offerings.

Scott McNealy, Sun chairman and chief executive officer, said: "Sun customers can now get all the benefits of Solaris OS, Linux and Java technologies running on their choice of UltraSparc and x86 systems."

By offering both Solaris OS and Linux, Sun will give customers a choice of enterprise operating systems and access to thousands of existing applications, or the ability to develop their own Java-based offerings.

"Today's agreement with Sun is a strong validation of AMD's growing customer acceptance inside the enterprise," said AMD president and chief executive Hector Ruiz.

Oracle is also promising to deliver Oracle support for the Sun/AMD hardware. Oracle's chief executive Larry Ellison said: "Soon Oracle will run on AMD Opteron under both Solaris and Linux.

"These new systems offer the rare combination of 64-bit big system performance and a very low price tag."