Just one week after wooing Wall Street, Sun Microsystems has secured a financial services win on the other side of The Pond.

France's BNP Paribas has picked up Sun's V20z Opteron-based servers for a new government compliance system as well a new risk-management analysis application for traders. Funny enough, the bank went very technical in its statement about the deal - seemingly taking a shot at Intel. "With Direct Connect Architecture, AMD helped remove the front-side bus bottleneck and directly connected the processors, the memory controller and the I/O, to improve overall system and performance efficiency," BNP said. Intel's Xeon chips have been derided by some as a type of old world architecture that creates memory bottlenecks unlike AMD's newish Opteron chips.

Last week, Sun tried to convince US financial services companies to come back to it after a couple years of neglect. The financial sector often looks for the most compute power possible at the lowest cost and picked a number of Linux on Intel systems following the boom - at a time when Sun sold no such systems. These days Sun is trying to draw attention to its large fleet of Opteron-based gear. Sun and HP are the biggest backers of AMD's still fledgling chip. ®

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