Taking on the juggernaut
Kreiten listed three areas in which he considers AMD to still have an advantage:
- Memory management in virtualisation
- Live migration in virtualisation
- Energy efficiency
Regarding memory management, Kreiten explained that there is a performance penalty incurred by using virtualisation. "Now things are very memory intensive," he said. "RVI minimises the performance penalty for using virtualisation."
RVI stands for Rapid Virtualisation Indexing and is a piece of technology built into the hardware by AMD. Kreiten pointed us to an assessment of RVI written by VMWare - the market leader in virtualisation software.
Migration concerns the transfer of virtual machines from one piece of hardware to another. As demonstrated in our earlier story on this matter, AMD thinks it offers and advantage in this area. "Our migration path is much longer," said Kreiten. "You never have to reconfigure your virtual server."
The argument about energy efficiency has been in place since the original Shanghai launch.
It remains to be seen if potential purchasers will be convinced by these claimed advantages, but now that the Intel marketing juggernaut is well and truly rolling AMD will, as ever, have to shout very loudly to make itself heard.
What do you think? Does AMD have a point or is it just fighting a rearguard battle? Let us know in the HEXUS.community discussion forums.
