Earlier this month I attended Microsoft’s TechEd conference in LA, and the question that kept popping up throughout the show was: why more cores??

 The interest in multi-core chips has been generated by AMD’s most recent roadmap update outlining our move to processors with 6-, 8- and 12-cores. The benefit of more cores, to me, is most easily equated to something I saw a lot of in LA – freeways.

Adding more cores is like adding extra lanes, allowing for more resources to drive virtual machines more effectively. Further, the more cores you add, the more CPU power you also have to divide among virtual machines, which means you can drive more overall VMs on that preverbal freeway. Essentially, you now have more room and more resources to drive up the efficiency of VMs across an entire system. A more detailed explanation on why more cores are useful can be found on Tim Mueting’s blog post on 4 Socket Servers and Real World Virtualization.

However, even AMD can admit: it’s not all about cores. Advancements in virtualization on the hardware level include features like “HyperTranport assist” – to be introduced with Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor codename “Istanbul” – to provide optimizations at the cache level that are designed to  show a real benefit in  4- and 8-socket systems. Since we are seeing virtualization customers focusing a lot of attention on these larger, robust platforms in terms of cores and memory, this new feature promises to enable  improved performance and efficiency (two things we like!). The industry is starting to get excited about “Istanbul” – check out Quick Take: AMD Istanbul Update blog.

Also, as we move to more cores, We’re planning to introduce another exciting development in  virtualization – the support of AMD-Vi (IOMMU) which is scheduled to hit the market later this year. AMD-Vi is designed to help improve security and performance by directly assigned devices to virtual machines. Further, continued optimizations are in the works to address the TLB, caches and improving the switching capabilities.

But what about the software? Plain and simple, hypervisors are ready and waiting for more cores. Microsoft, Citrix, VMware all have versions ready to handle the growing number of cores, with Hyper-V, XenServer, and vSphere. Our six-core “Istanbul” is due out in June and will be supported across 2-, 4- and 8- socket servers, which range from 12 to 48 cores! And, as we continue to grow our core count through our 12-core AMD Opteron processor codenamed “Magny-Cours”, expect to see even more collaboration with our software partners to make sure we’re optimizing to provide the most value to the end user.

Finally, talks are heating up around graphic virtualization and live migration across heterogeneous processor environments. Lots to get excited about – stay tuned!

Margaret Lewis, director, AMD commercial software and solutions

Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her 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.

@margaretjlewis