The thing with Commodore was that as a company it was just totally dysfunctional. The basically did little useful development between C64 and the Amiga (the Amiga being mostly not their development). The Amiga didn't sell very well, specially in the US.
The company was going to shit after the Amiga launched, it took a competent manager to save the company and turn the Amiga around into a moderate success.
Commodore didn't really have money to keep up chip development. They had their fab they would have need to upgrade that as well, or drop it somehow.
Another example of that is the Acorn Archimedes. Absolutely fucking incredibly hardware for the price. Like crushing everything in price vs performance. But ... literally launched with a de-novo operating system with 0 applications. And its was a small company in Britain.
The dream scenario is for Sun to realize that they should build a low cost all costume chip device. They had the margin on the higher end business to support such a development for 2-3 generations and to get most software ported to it. They also had the software skill to make the hardware/software in a way that would allow future upgrades.
Imagining Sun buying Amiga and making it a lower end consumer workstation to pair with its higher end ones, with all the much-needed resources and interesting software that would have brought to the Amiga is a really cool thought experiment!
Sun did actually approach Commodore to license its technology for low end work station. However the Commodore CEO at the time declined for unknown reasons.
I don't know what Sun had planned for this tech.
A even more interesting approach for Sun would have been to cooperate or acquire Acorn. The Acorn Archimedes was an almost perfect low end work station product. Its incredible weakness was its lack of OS and it total lack of applications.
Acorn spend an absolutely absurd amount of money to try to get the OS and application on the platform. They spend 3 years developing an new OS, and then realized that this was going nowhere. So they rushed out another new OS. And then they realized that nobody want to buy a machine with a compromise OS and no application. So they had to put up huge effort to try to fix that. The company simply couldn't sustain that kind of effort on the Software side while at the same time building new processors and new machines. Its surprising what they achieved but it wasn't a good strategy.
Had they just adopted SunOS (BSD) it would have been infinitely better for them. And for Sun to release new high and and low end RISC workstations at the same time would have been an absolute bomb in the market.
Even if you added all the bells and whistles to the system (Ethernet, SCSI, extra RAM), you could be very low priced and absolutely blow pretty much every other system out of the water.
Re Acorn though — As much better from a market perspective as buying Acorn and releasing RISC- and BSD-based low-end workstations might have been for Sun, I still prefer to imagine a world where the Amiga's unique hardware and software got to live on — perhaps with compatibility layers to run Sun software, but nevertheless preserving a UNIX-like but still non-UNIX OS lineage and non-generic-PC hardware lineage.
The company was going to shit after the Amiga launched, it took a competent manager to save the company and turn the Amiga around into a moderate success.
Commodore didn't really have money to keep up chip development. They had their fab they would have need to upgrade that as well, or drop it somehow.
Another example of that is the Acorn Archimedes. Absolutely fucking incredibly hardware for the price. Like crushing everything in price vs performance. But ... literally launched with a de-novo operating system with 0 applications. And its was a small company in Britain.
The dream scenario is for Sun to realize that they should build a low cost all costume chip device. They had the margin on the higher end business to support such a development for 2-3 generations and to get most software ported to it. They also had the software skill to make the hardware/software in a way that would allow future upgrades.