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AMD and Microsoft collaborate on virtualization


By David Worthington
May 15, 2009 — 
LOS ANGELES — AMD and Microsoft are working together to improve the performance of virtualized Windows applications.

Microsoft has had input into the development of AMD’s upcoming “Istanbul” processor, which is due to ship in June. AMD says that Istanbul, a six-core processor, will provide near native virtualization performance with better memory and I/O performance than earlier chips. The processor uses Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) technology for memory management.

The companies had worked closely as AMD developed RVI, which manages memory for hypervisors at the hardware level, said Jeff Woolsey, principal program manager in Windows Server for Hyper-V at Microsoft, in an interview Wednesday at Microsoft TechEd. RVI was added to AMD's Opteron processors in 2007.

Prior to that, Microsoft’s hypervisor had to govern physical memory address space for virtual machines, he explained. “Now we shunt that work down to the processor; it frees up megabytes of memory.”

AMD and Microsoft began to co-develop virtualization technology before AMD announced its “Pacifica” generation of hardware in 2005, said Margaret Lewis, director of commercial solutions at AMD. Pacifica was the code name for the virtualization extensions that have resided in its hardware since 2006.

Several years ago, AMD’s 64-bit Opteron processor took Hyper-V development to a new level by helping to take 64-bit computing—with its greater memory support—into the mainstream, said Woolsey.

Work is also ongoing with Microsoft’s Windows Server product team. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 was the first operating system to have default support for AMD PowerNow, a system for advanced server power management, she noted.

“Our main design goal for virtualization is to reach near native application performance. Microsoft talks about the same thing with [Windows] user experience,” Lewis said. Ultimately, the companies want to be able to virtualize heavy workloads.

“Virtualization has the muscle to drive any kind of workload. As we mature and develop it, it should become a standard part of anybody’s infrastructure,” she said.


Related Search Term(s): AMD, Microsoft, virtualization


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