Sun Microsystems, a leading maker of servers, has issued a statement regarding Dell’s decision to use microprocessors from Advanced Micro Devices in its PowerEdge machines. The company said that the plan proves superiority of AMD’s 64-bit microprocessors.

“AMD’s superior technology and market share growth made this decision inevitable.  Welcome to the party,” said John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun’s systems group.

Sun is AMD’s largest server partner, which supplies a huge part of all servers powered by AMD Opteron processors. Sun even said that it plans to put some efforts into further development of AMD Opteron processors. Sun will also continue to develop its own UltraSparc central processing units for high-end servers, where those chips compete against Intel Corp.’s Itanium-series processors.

AMD’s marker share in x86 server market increased to 22.1% in Q1 2006, up from 16.4% in the fourth quarter in 2005. Given that the demand towards server processors from AMD is growing, it was impossible for Dell, whose profit margins have been under pressure from companies like HP, to ignore AMD64-based servers, as traditionally enterprise-class computers cost more than desktops and have higher profit margins.