SUN has deals in place with TI for chip manufacturing ... NOT FOR MUCH LONGER

TI has announced that they won't build a 32nm fab due to the exorbitant (an estimated 3 billion dollars just for R&D, excluding the fab itself, quoted in EETimes) costs involved. The last fab TI will ever build is a 45nm fab. That's a fact. Google it.

After that: Quo vadis, SUN?

Join the consortium around IBM - IBM being a major competitor in the server market? (Guess who will get priority at the IBM fabs, and guess who will get the leftovers.)

No, in my humble opinion, SUN is rapidly running out of road with their proprietary architecture and they would be best advised to drop SPARC and migrate over to the Intel/AMD platform. Maybe their quickly expanding Intel/AMD-based product lineup is already the first sign of SUN's "abandon SPARC" strategy, which will then become final after everybody and his dog has moved to 32nm and SPARC is stuck at the 45nm node.