Today was an exciting day for AMD. We announced that AMD is a key processor partner for cloud computing solutions offered by various software partners and customers – Microsoft, STRATO and DAUM Communications, to name a few. And we’re thrilled to be talking about the performance and workloads that matter for businesses today and beyond.

It’s also worth noting that Microsoft today announced the Community Technology Preview of its cloud services operating system, Windows Azure™ Compute Service, in Ray Ozzie’s keynote at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC) 2008. The Quad Core AMD Opteron™ processor is the processor foundation of Windows Azure and the Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) feature in our processor has enabled Microsoft to meet its design goals: efficient low-overhead virtual machine while meeting data center power requirements.

Today’s news continues the strong partnership that began back in 2002 when AMD and Microsoft began collaborating to deliver the advantages of 64-bit computing to the x86 world with Windows x64.

These announcements come amid a lot of cloud computing chatter, including this month’s forecast from IDC that it expects spending on IT cloud services to reach $42 billion by 2012, a threefold growth. We’re also seeing regular updates on the reliability – or lack thereof – of the cloud.

If we take a step back (beyond the fluff), I believe cloud computing really represents a step forward to the next generation of web-based enterprise technologies—which will help companies to increase capacity and capabilities without significantly increasing investments.

At the same time, IT managers understand that cloud computing environments require the performance and scalability to handle the heaviest user traffic peaks while balancing cost, power and security concerns, a seemingly impossible feat. At AMD, we’re focused on delivering processors to the market that enable significant energy efficiency while powering solutions that successfully handle heavy peak workloads without sacrificing performance. In fact, Quad Core AMD Opteron processors use advanced virtualization features like AMD Virtualization™ with RVI that play well in the cloud, building an efficient and effective infrastructure.

We are already seeing success in the cloud computing community, as major and influential companies have become customers. DAUM Communications, one of the largest portal sites in Korea, selected Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors to power its server systems for the company’s next generation web search service infrastructure. In addition, STRATO, Europe’s second largest Web host, has expanded its portfolio of virtual and dedicated servers with highly efficient Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors to help achieve its goals of business growth and green computing.

Despite still somewhat nebulous benefits, as the cloud comes into focus I firmly believe that we’re witnessing the beginning of a more widespread approach that companies large and small will turn to with confidence and come away with success.

Feel free to contact us and we can follow up with more information, software.strategies@amd.com.