We all know that there's an intense rivalry between the Sunnyvale, California-based chip marker AMD and competitor Intel. What this means is that either of these companies will probably stop at nothing in order to prove the supremacy of its products over those of its competitor. Recently, we've seen both AMD and Intel introducing several new processors designed to meet the requirements of today's server systems. However, it looks like AMD is the first to announce that its quad-core Opteron processors are powering a significant number of server platforms.

 

The company has certainly gained a strategic position, now that 37 platforms from global OEMs are being powered by its server-class quad-core Opteron processors. In addition, the chip maker seems to be playing the virtualization card increasingly more.

Just recently, Advanced Micro announced a collaboration with Microsoft, which is meant to improve the adoption of virtualization servers in the SMB sector. Moreover, today, Dell has announced two new Opteron-equipped server systems, part of its PowerEdge lineup, which are designed to offer a better virtualization experience for business customers. One of these two new PowerEdge servers has allowed Dell to claim it has the only 16-core x86 server to support 11 tiles or 66 virtual machines in VMmark performance testing.

 

 “Virtualization technology is an essential solution for businesses seeking to create efficient and easy to manage data centers,” said Patrick Patla, general manager, Server and Workstation Business, AMD. “Our processor technology combined with these new Dell PowerEdge servers offer a solution that can help speed mainstream virtualization adoption in the industry. We are excited that more customers now have greater choice in virtualization platforms and are able to take advantage of the performance leadership delivered by AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture.”

 

AMD's new quad-core Opteron processors also include a considerable number of features, including AMD-V technology and Rapid Virtualization Indexing, which can enable a significantly improved virtualization performance.

 

“Dell is offering customers a smarter path to virtualization with its new blades and across its entire portfolio of enterprise products and services,” said Director of Server Product Marketing, Dell, Sally Stevens. “Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors with AMD-V technology have been instrumental in achieving this level of virtualization performance, especially in memory-intensive applications.”