For those of you following this blog, you have probably put it together that I am in fact a long time Pittsburgh Steelers fan. And just for the record, growing up in NY in the 1970’s as a loud-mouth Pittsburgh Steelers fan was not an easy thing. People ask me why I became a Steelers fan and I usually start rattling off the names – Lambert, Ham, Blount, Greene, Webster, Bleier, but in the end it was really the way the Steelers did their talking on the field they made me put up with the constant badgering by want to be Jets and Giants fans. I idolized guys like Dick Butkus and Ray Nitschke both in the way they played the game but also the way they carried themselves on and off the field. Could you imagine TO, Chad Johnson or Tony Romo pulling their antics with Vince Lombardi or Chuck Noll as their coach? To say the game has changed since warriors like Chuck Bednarick or Jim Taylor played would be the understatement of the year.

I guess the one thing that irks me most is seeing a player celebrate a basic play when his team is down 20 points with 2 minutes to play or if he makes a tackle 35 yards down the field. The saying “there is no I in TEAM” does not apply for the majority of the NFL. Football is a team sport and those that succeed are usually those that work together for the better good of the whole. Likewise in business, companies that deliver value through strong partnership are generally those that are most successful. Nowhere is this truer than in the technology market where value is often generated only through the combination or partnership of hardware, software and services.

With our upcoming launch of "Shanghai," we’re seeing an incredible display of teamwork in delivering stable x86 server platforms. As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, our OEM customers were able to quickly validate their platforms and actually pull their launches in. Feedback I’ve received is that they’ve found Shanghai to be an easy platform to bring to market due to the silicon stability and minimal modifications. We had teams of people dedicated to working with each of our OEMs and thanks to this teamwork you can expect to see Shanghai servers in the market very soon. Similarly, we worked in lock-step with our infrastructure partners. Thanks to this cooperation, our channel partners worldwide will be able to offer customized Shanghai platforms.

Our processors are compatible with a wide range of versions of operating systems, and things will be no different with Shanghai. We continued our close technology partnership with the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP and SuSe. This means that customers can expect to find immediate support for Shanghai in all of the leading enterprise applications.

Now for my picks. While it is tempting to blame my 13 year old son for missing both picks last week, I will take full responsibility myself – although Ryan is running a few extra sprints at practice this week to make it up to all the loyal readers This week I am pulling out the big guns and having my 15 year old son Tanner making the picks. Tanner plays halfback and linebacker on his high school team and is truly a throwback to the days of Butkus and Nitschke.

Shoe-In = Cards crushing the Niners

Upset = Eagles over the Giants in a close game

Insight = Closer collaboration between hardware and OS suppliers on RAS feature will accelerate the penetration of x86 into the traditionally RISC/Unix mid-range server space

Two weeks away from the keyboard and it seems like an eternity. My last blog left off with the tie donning Mike Nolan still walking the Niners sideline, the Raiders looking more like a CFL team than an NFL team and AMD in questionable financial condition. Well things have certainly changed on all fronts. And in the end change can be a good thing and can lead to a renewed focus and sustainability.

First, the 49ers announced earlier this week that they were letting go of Mike Nolan and promoting Mike Singletary to head coach. While you can’t help but to love Nolan and his “traditional” approach to football I have to admit that I am a bit surprised it took this long. The Niners just are not winning. Handing over the reigns to a gritty, no-nonsense, hard-nosed ex-linebacker like Mike Singletary will certainly be a contrast in personalities. It remains to be seen whether the Niners can win with the team they have, but I for one am sure excited to see change in San Francisco, especially if the Niners take on the personality of their new head coach.

As for the Raiders, they replaced their head coach three weeks ago, putting Tom Cable in charge, and actually won a game this week, beating the Jets in overtime on an amazing 52 yard field goal by Sebastian Janikowski. Now granted the Jets are not lighting things up themselves and Brett Favre would have to be considered the disappointment of the year thus far (another blog for another day), but a win is a win. The team seems to have a new found spirit and approach to the game. Granted the offense still looks more like the Edmonton Eskimos than the Oakland Raiders, but the defense and special teams has shown a new sign of life.

Speaking of a sign of life, AMD announced last week that we’re shipping our new series of Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processors – codenamed “Shanghai.” We’ve found our footing and are in the midst of preparing for not only the defense of our server business but also going on the offensive with the gains we expect in terms of performance and power-consumption. “Shanghai” was designed with energy-efficiency and performance-per-watt in mind and based on early feedback, our industry partners are fully recognizing this. Industry analysts are already hearing positive things from their clients and how OEMs are working to build systems.

I can tell you from my own experience, once OEM partners had samples in their hands – the entire game began to change. Because of our commitment to platform stability, OEM partners have been able to quickly validate their new platforms and as a result of this, we expect that you should begin to see the first systems with “Shanghai” available before the end of the year.

I am really proud of our “Shanghai” team, as they have led an amazing turnaround in the way AMD designs and brings to market new processors. Not only has the team achieved the recognition we were seeking, the lessons they have learned, and new processes they have established, are already being applied to future processor programs.

And as my colleague Pat Patla, GM of Server Marketing, said, “We’re firing on all cylinders.”

I have to admit that Mac came through for me last time helping me hit the shoe-in and the upset. This week I am a bit hesitant taking his advice after seeing him skip back to the huddle at his game on Sunday (yes, I told him there was no skipping in football). In any case, here we go:

Shoe-In = Philadelphia at home over Atlanta

Upset = The Colts hand the Titans their first loss of the year

Insight = Consolidation among hardware OEMs will be accelerated by the troubled economy

Sure, there’s new management at VMware, a repositioning to the operating system for the virtual datacenter, and lots of new competition. But what struck me even more than those changes are the fact that the x86 virtualization movement, started all those years ago by Diane and Mendel, is going mainstream, and that’s very very exciting for someone like me, who’s in charge of helping making sure AMD’s customers have the best experience possible in running software on AMD hardware.

One proof point is just the sheer amount of attention VMWorld is getting this year. Who would have ever thought the conference that attracted 1,600 early adopters of x86 virtualization to San Diego in Nov. 2004 would be hosting 14,000 mainstream IT professionals in Sept. 2008? And that the New York Times would write so much about a technology as enterprise focused as virtualization! I think this demonstrates the power that virtualization is already playing in shaping the future of the computing industry.

A second proof point is the amazing number of new servers I see being introduced by everyone from large OEMs to small system builders that are specifically aimed at serving as excellent virtualization solutions. For example both Dell and HP have recently introduced blades based on the energy efficient Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor that are designed to handle the rigors of memory-intensive virtualization.

A final proof point that virtualization has gone mainstream is the thriving ecosystem developing around virtualization. Just take a look at the presentations that were given in AMD’s own booth at the show – our “Master of Virtualization” theater was filled with small and large ISVs and IHVs who were showcasing how they are moving the needle on virtualization – including 3Leaf, Broadcom, Citrix, DataRam, Egenera, Microsoft, Novell, Sun, Transitive, Parallels, and Virtual Iron.

So what’s next in these times of change? I believe that as virtualization pushes it way into the main stream – and lights up discussions around topics such as cloud computing, virtual infrastructure, and dynamic data center fabrics –  the virtualization ecosystem needs to understand that interoperability, open standards, and vendor cooperation has to be paramount. Customers are looking for choice – and not for technologies designed to lock out competition. They want live migration of virtual machines across different processors and tools that can manage virtual machines created by any hypervisor. Feel free to contact me and we can follow up with more information.

It was quite a Week 2 in the National Football League. Blown call. Risky 2-point conversion. Brett Favre’s first loss as a Jet. The Patriots being the Patriots. And of course another Steelers hard-nose win vs. the Browns.

One team who continues to surprise many – in a bad way – is the Cincinnati Bengals. They lost their home opener 24-7 to a team without their starting quarterback. And after two games, here’s how they stack-up against the other teams: ranked 30^th in points per game, 31^st in total offense and 32^nd in Passing Yards per game. (Just a reminder; there are only 32 teams in the NFL.) And to add further insult to their performance, the Bengals have the distinction of having more “12 men on the field” penalties then they do touchdowns.

But what is most surprising is the cadre of Pro-Bowl caliber offensive weapons the Bengals posses; Houshmandzadeh, Chad Johnson (I refuse to refer to him as Ocho Cinco – a post for another time) and Carson Palmer.

While no one can disagree that these three aren’t playing at the top of their game, there seems to be a much larger problem – the foundation of the offense line. A lackluster rushing game generally has more to do with poor O-Line performance than poor back performance. And judging by the pressure on Palmer all day, there’s definitely a weakness with their offensive line.

Personally, I love offensive linemen and would offer that they are the toughest, most dedicated unsung heroes of any winning team. They are the foundation of the infrastructure that makes players like Palmer and Johnson so great. When the O-Line clicks so do the Bengals and right now they are not clicking.

Thinking about infrastructure and foundation, Intel this week officially announced their “Dunnington” server processor with all the glitz you would expect from a marketing company like Intel (more cores!, more cache!, more power!). However the core infrastructure of the chip is still fundamentally flawed with an off-die memory controller and bottlenecks galore in the overall micro-architecture.

Just as you’ll likely see some team (see Oakland Raiders) fire their head coach as a stopgap measure, “Dunnington” is another stopgap solution our competition has targeted for multi-processor based servers. It continues to leverage Intel’s current approach to multi-core computing for multi-processor servers, and its use of a traditional Front-Side Bus (FSB) architecture.

So in many respects the Bengals and Dunnington are suffering from the same problem (you won’t see that comparison anywhere else for sure), weak core infrastructure and foundation. While I don’t have a lot of confidence in the Bengals beating the Giants this week, I do believe they have a better chance than “Dunnington” does in adding significant value for many IT shops.