Counter attack
AMD has been pushing its Opteron server processors hard in recent weeks and it's surely no coincidence that Intel is about to launch its Xeon 5500 series, the first server/workstation CPUs to be based on its Nehalem architecture.
The two biggest buzzwords associated with the server market for the foreseeable future are virtualisation and cloud computing, with the former considered an enabler of the latter due to its ability to make servers operate at a much greater level of efficiency.
So AMD understandably want to make its Opteron CPUs synonymous with virtualisation in a bid to reverse some of the inertia operating in Intel's favour in the server market.
One of the things you can do with virtualisation software is make a ‘virtual machine', which is not tied to a specific piece of hardware. In the clip below, AMD has chosen to demonstrate the live migration of a virtual machine across three generations of Opteron CPU as an illustration of its claimed leadership in virtualisation technology.