Windows Vista Will Not Be Ready for AMD's Barcelona

Microsoft's latest operating system Windows Vista will not be ready for the launch of the world's first x86 CPU designed to integrate no less than four processing cores on the same die of silicon. Initially, AMD announced the availability of its Quad-Core Opteron processor codenamed Barcelona by the end of August. Latest reports reveal that the launch date has in fact slipped to September 10, 2007. Still, Microsoft will not let Barcelona slip it by.

The Redmond company optimized its server operating systems for the AMD Quad-Core Opteron processors. In this context, both Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008, formerly codenamed Longhorn have been adjusted to tailor fit the Barcelona technology. Currently, Microsoft plans to release Windows Server 2008 to manufacturing by the end of 2007, and to launch the final version of its last 32-bit server platform at the end of February 2008.

"More than ever before, customers are expecting energy-efficiency and performance-per-watt leadership as much as absolute performance. With this new reality of computing, greater performance at the expense of greater power consumption is no longer an option," said Randy Allen, corporate vice president, Server and Workstation Division at AMD. "AMD has prioritized production of our low power and standard power products because our customers and ecosystem demand it, and we firmly believe that the introduction of our native Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor will deliver on the promise of the highest levels of performance-per-watt the industry has ever seen."

The optimizations that will be introduced to Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 involve tuning the software in order to deliver additional performance, optimized power consumption, and to best take advantage of the built-in hardware virtualization technology. Microsoft is not alone in this aspect. Novell, Red Hat, Sun and Vmware have also optimized their server side operating systems for Barcelona. Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Sun Solaris 10, and VMware ESX have all been prepared for AMD's Quad-Core Opteron processors.