OIL & GAS

SAN FRANCISCO — Sun Microsystems' Solaris will become the third operating system to take advantage of Advanced Micro Devices' 64-bit Opteron processor. Solaris already runs on 32-bit "x86" processors including AMD's Athlon and Intel's Xeon. But Sun also will release a version in 2004 that will take advantage of the 64-bit extensions that make Opteron different from those other chips, Sun software chief Jonathan Schwartz told reporters in a meeting here Thursday. Sun made the decision because of the speed that software shows on Opteron, Mr. Schwartz said. "It is highly performant on the systems we've looked at now," he said. A test version of Solaris for Opteron is scheduled to arrive in the first quarter of 2004, with the final version later in the year, Mr. Schwartz said. SuSE Linux has a 64-bit version of Linux that runs on Opteron; Red Hat plans to release one this month; and Microsoft will release a version of Windows for the chip in 2004.