Avastu Blog: Sustainable Global Clouds

Nice read, this doc. In a native system the operating system maintains a mapping of logical page numbers (LPNs) to physical page numbers (PPNs) in page table structures. When a logical address is accessed, the hardware walks these page tables to determine the corresponding physical address. For faster memory access the x86 hardware caches the most recently used LPN->PPN mappings in its translation lookaside buffer (TLB). In a virtualized system the guest operating system maintains page tables just like in a native system, but the VMM maintains an additional mapping of PPNs to machine page numbers (MPNs). In shadow paging the VMM maintains PPN->MPN mappings in its internal data structures and stores LPN->MPN mappings in shadow page tables that are exposed to the hardware. The most recently used LPN->MPN translations are cached in the hardware TLB. The VMM keeps these shadow page tables synchronized to the guest page tables. This synchronization introduces virtualization over...

"AMD has an extensive track record of helping enterprises face demanding challenges by enabling flexible, virtualized systems that address major issues including server consolidation, business continuity and disaster recovery," said Patrick Patla, general manager, Server and Workstation Business, AMD. "AMD's latest benchmark result underscores the fact that Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors are more than just four cores and provide innovations such as AMD Virtualization with Rapid Virtualization Indexing to help deliver an ideal platform for addressing real-world data center needs." Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) technology is designed to offer near-native performance of virtualized applications while enabling fast switching between virtual machines (VMs.) The VMmark 1.1 consolidation benchmark, released by VMware in May 2008, ...

NEW YORK – June 2, 2008 – AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced the launch of AMD Changing the Game , the first initiative of the newly formed AMD Foundation . The AMD Changing the Game program is intended to improve critical technical and life skills by teaching kids to develop digital games with social content. The program is rooted in AMD’s commitment and experience in supporting education with the company’s passion and expertise in the gaming industry. The program’s launch accompanies AMD’s sponsorship and participation at the Fifth Annual Games for Change Festival to be held June 3 - 4 at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. AMD Changing the Game is a natural fit for AMD, which features products powering the visual experience of the two most popular gaming consoles in the world today [1] and which recently launched AMD GAME!, a program designed to help consumers select perfectly suited PCs for high-definition gaming. “ We have a tremendous opportunity to harne...

In the four-socket server space, AMD’s lead has stayed “rock solid”, according to Allen, while the single-socket business grew steadily throughout 2007. The only downturn has been in the two-socket space, which he attributed to competition from Intel’s newly introduced quad-core chips towards the end of 2007. When it comes to explaining these figures, Allen indicated an increasing emphasis on performance per Watt among customers, plus demand for features to better support virtualisation ­ areas where AMD claims it still has a lead over the competition. “Our advantages for energy efficiency and handling virtual workloads sustained us,” he said, but added that platform stability also played a part. For examhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif ple, the quad-core parts have been designed as a drop-in replacement for AMD’s older dual-core Opteron chips, enabling customers to upgrade existing servers for greater performance if they wish, without having to worry about higher power consumpti...

So hang in tight, people!

AMD is announcing the availability of the AMD 780G chipset, designed to deliver the ultimate mainstream computing experience. The new chipset enables leading global OEMs and system builders to design PCs that provide users with full HD and best-in-class 3D graphics performance, enhanced scalability and rock-solid stability for mainstream gaming, multimedia and commercial PCs. Gamers will appreciate the detail-rich images and dynamic interactivity when playing the latest DirectX 10 games. Additionally, ATI Hybrid Graphics Technology is achieved by utilizing AMD’s new integrated chipset, the 780G and one of the ATI Radeon GPUs. ATI Hybrid Graphics Technology utilizes one video card plugged into the PCI-Express slot and is able to join forces with the GPU built into the motherboard chipset to scale graphics performance. This allows game play at higher resolution, higher frame rates and higher image quality in 3D games, improving the gaming experience. More here...

Got this from Scott some days back, forgot to post it. It is dated today so I am not really late! Rewriting the rules for enthusiast computing, AMD (NYSE: AMD) today unveiled its new platform codenamed “Spider”, with the first true quad-core processor supporting scalable graphics for The Ultimate Visual Experience™. The AMD Spider platform combines the introduction of AMD Phenom™ quad-core processors , ATI Radeon™ HD 3800 Series graphics processors with Microsoft DirectX ® 10.1 support, AMD 7-Series chipsets with CrossFireX™ and AMD OverDrive™ software. The AMD Spider platform is a major milestone on the path to Accelerated Computing, AMD’s vision for platform-level acceleration through co-processing. “AMD is the only company committed to delivering The Ultimate Visual Experience across all the screens of your life,” said Dirk Meyer, president and COO, AMD. “The AMD Spider platform embodies our approach to platform-level innovation and delivers a highly-advanced, feature-rich enthus...

Got this from our AMD community. Check out the video, it speaks for itself!

El Reg carried out this Survey: Rather than explore the often contentious feeds and speeds angle, the poll observed the loyalty — if any — of IT departments towards the chipmakers. The survey first asked for a vote in favor of either AMD or Intel. Respondents were queried on whether they consider their data center a "die-hard AMD shop," or "die-hard Intel shop." The majority of participants — about 71 per cent — say they aren't in the AMD camp. While that doesn't necessarily mean they don't have any AMD-based servers, or don't plan to buy them in the future, it does suggest that AMD's foothold in the market is currently relatively small. See the rest here.

The ATI bods have long built an Overdrive feature into their graphics card drivers, allowing for some clock-pumping overclocking action to boost performance. Well, in the light of increased competition from Chipzilla, it seems that AMD could well be taking a lesson from its Canadian cousins and including such a feature with new Phenom processors. Check this out for that feature, you could put individual CPUs in overdrive. Cool stuff this. L'inq

I guess its Saturday and imaginations are flying. This L'Inq reporter thinks AMD can still save the ship. I didn't know that the ship was sinkin'! Option 1 AMD continues as it is, comes out of the doldrums, creates internal $$$ to repay the mounting debt, and Hector Ruiz becomes the new Steve Jobs-like IT hero figure. Option 2 IBM decides it is the time, and buys AMD as it is, lock stock and barrel. Benefits? It gains control of its own competitive X86 platform, with potential future socket compatibility with POWER7 for cross-platform shared infrastructure, sets up truly serious competition against Intel. Headaches? Well, what to do with the current management, and why should IBM bother repaying all those debts. Option 3 Samsung comes in, figuring out it should continue where it stopped in 2001 after the Alphacide. Samsung did try to get into the worldwide 64 bit CPU market then with Alpha, and could do it now again with AMD. Will it happen? Hardly, in my mind - Uncle Sam m...

Rosenblum also laid out a blueprint for some of the issues he'd like to see the AMD and Intel tackle. He said that VMware didn't always get what it wanted from the processor makers and that VMware needed more visibility into how virtual machines use the processor cache in order to provide better quality of service. In particular, he referred to the problem of a VM demanding huge amounts of processor resource that affected other processor cores. He said: "We've made great steps, but if you have a 10-gig NIC with tiny packets coming, it can consume a whole CPU just looking at each of them, so it's really difficult trying to match line rate." Link

THE VMWARE REP here in Barcelona was openly praising the performance of AMD's Barcelona processors, but there was a small whoopsie at the end of presentation, during the Q&A session. When asked what how VMware is supporting, Steve Jackson (official title Director for Strategic Partnerships, VMware EMEA) stated that at this moment, VMware does not support Nested Paging, one of key features of AMD V marchitecture. This includes ESX 3i, a product released yesterday, just in time for AMD quad-core Opteron launch L'inq

VNUnet reporting: A group of vendors including Dell is preparing a new standard that will bridge the gap between Intel and AMD servers in virtualized environments, vnunet.com has learned. Chipmakers currently enable the live migration of virtual machines between processor generations. AMD already offers such technology in its Opteron processors, and Intel on Wednesday unveiled VT FlexMigration, a similar technology that will be added to future server processors. Migrating workloads between processor generations poses a challenge because older generations lack some of the features in newer chips. The AMD and Intel technologies solve this problem by essentially scaling down features of the more advanced chips to match those of the oldest generation in a server pool. Well we will see more such interoperability initiatives as virtualization becomes pervasive!

The SSE5 extensions to the X64 instruction set are much more important than the virtualization announcement, and both are unquestionably less important--at least for now--than getting a competitive quad-core processor out the door to compete with Intel. Just like AMD took the bull by the horns and added 64-bit memory extensions to the X86 architecture years ahead of Intel, with the SSE5 extensions AMD is going to take the SSE instruction set developed for 32-bit X86 and 64-bit X64 processors by Intel and extend them. The SSE5 specs are also being put out there for all to see, and they include special instructions for number-crunching, media processing, and memory operations that substantially speed up the performance of applications. SSE is Intelspeak for Streaming SIMD Extensions, and SIMD is short for Single Instruction Multiple Data. Intel introduced SSE in 1999 with its Pentium III processors, and it was a direct response to the multimedia extensions called 3DNow that AMD created f...

The tests were performed on servers configured with 2, 4, 6 and 8 gigabytes of main memory at various transaction processing load levels. The results show that for certain configurations and at certain load levels the Intel Xeon based server was 2.4 to 11.7 percent more power efficient while in other cases the AMD Opteron based server was 9.2 to 23.1 percent more power efficient. In addition, when the systems were idle and waiting for transactions to process, the AMD server was 30.4 to 53.1 percent more power efficient. Power consumption while the servers are idle is particularly significant since many servers spend most of their time waiting for work. A November 16, 2006 press release(1) from IBM quotes a report by the Robert Frances Group(2) which states that on average servers in datacenters are idle 80 to 85 percent of the time. Other observations that can be made from the test results include: 1) Larger memory configurations deliver both higher throughput and better power efficien...

To loosen the live-migration constraints, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD released a white paper disclosing details about AMD-V Extended Migration, a feature dating back to the first-generation Opteron processor that enables virtual machines to migrate between different versions of AMD processors. The need for migration ease "Our customers are very interested in doing live migration because of the flexibility it provides," said Margaret Lewis, director of commercial solutions at AMD. "[AMD-V Extended Migration] is where the rubber meets the road. We've made this interface on the hardware end, but it is up to software to implement it." AMD-V Extended Migration masks the differences between CPU generations, facilitating the safe live migration of virtual machines between servers running different generations of AMD processors. This includes existing single- and dual-core processors and all future AMD processor revisions, including the upcoming Barcelona quad-core AMD ...

Kelly from el Reg reporting: Chip maker AMD will pump an undisclosed stack of cash into research and development funds for virtualisation solutions provider Nivio. AMD said the investment was intended to support Nivio's vision of virtual desktop access for a worldwide audience. Nivio has been beta testing its software for the past 18 months and said it hopes the service could eventually enable users to access their personal Windows desktops from any internet connected device. Meanwhile, AMD said it has signed the deal with Nivio as part of its own drive to extend internet access to so-called emerging markets. Nivio already provides a similar service to users who have a broadband connection. No date has been officially set, but the service, which Nivio said has received positive user feedback, is expected to launch in the UK and India shortly. Check it out.