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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sidney Street who wrote (201336)	6/9/2006 9:12:42 AM
From: Rink	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Sidney, As I understood it AMD's virtualization technique (Pacifica) supports IO virtualization in addition to mem virtualizaton (only the latter is supported by Intel's VT technique Vanderpool). The integrated mem controller + xbar have often been mentioned as giving AMD a significant edge here. Till this moment I haven't seen any benchmarks for this (it appears it's difficult to do a single benchmark on multiple Operating System instances). Special 3P processors do give AMD an edge because AMD has low latency (point to point interconnect) HTX slots (hypertransport extention slots) in which they potentially can be dropped. This is a bit hypothetical as the only usage so far was for Opteron cards, and Infineon cards for clusters. Besides the HTX slots AMD is now selectively licensing cHT (coherent hypertransport that is used to communicate between Opteron processors) to 3P's as well. This seems much more promising as despite the short time since the announcement there are already several 3P's that have presented a coprocessor module that can be dropped into a normal Opteron socket (so every dual socket system can potentially be populated with an Opteron + coprocessor combi). It means a great reduction in all kinds of costs, and a great increase performance (in general only for a small specialized groups of business applications though). AMD has a huge edge here as Intel will not be able to match it for another couple of years. Regards, Rink