You may have seen recent blogs from me on the topic of social networks and their growth. I even subjected my Computex blogs to these media. Why do we spend time with this stuff – we don’t sell software! In the end, it’s because trends in our industry are important for AMD, and personally satisfying to me to stay up to date on these. The creative minds in our industry continue to find new ways to use technology and it’s a challenge just saying current. But what’s equally surprising is the speed that the “under 30” crowd adopts these new media/social networks. This new social model is one of the emerging Internet use scenarios that has come to be known as Web 2.0.

I find a great deal of satisfaction in this fast growing market especially in light of some recent announcements that AMD made regarding the AMD Opteron processor’s web performance. AMD recently announced that Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor Model 2356 and Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor Model 8356 now hold the top x86 web performance records for both 2P and 4P servers, as measured by the SPECweb®2005 benchmark. This means that the AMD-based server architecture is able to process and manage more data over a period of time than competing solutions and therefore keep the media rich social networks operating at ever faster speeds. As I was writing this blog, I read a related blog from Nigel Dessau on the subject of workloads and balancing loads. We’ve spent a great deal of time and effort to enable and optimize these new networks but we did not stop there. I blogged recently on 2^nd generation notebooks and highlighted the new features that we have enabled through our ATI acquisition including our UVD (universal video decoder) which is optimized to consume rich media such as web video.

AMD continues to focus on solutions. Just to be clear, what this means to us is power and performance optimized silicon, platforms optimized with partners and customers to deliver real benefits. These benefits are provided on the server side as a web backbone and on the notebook and desktop as power/performance optimized clients. So AMD is again leading and enabling major transitions in the industry by leveraging our unique capabilities to create, process, serve up and consume this new-fangled thing called Web 2.0.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.