Posts tagged with Rapid Virtualization Indexing

Spend any time in a foreign country and you get a new respect for the bilingual folks in the world.  Especially those that can seamlessly move between two very different languages.  After 3 years of high school German, I can stumble my way through German as long as the conversation is simple (especially if I am talking to children). I’ve made my way through Spain, France and Italy with the help of dictionaries and patient people.

But even with a dictionary, I fell all over myself in Japan.  Having dinner with a friend last week who has been in Japan for several years, it was amazing to see him move between a conversation with me in English and Japanese conversations with the waiters without even hesitating.  It was second nature to him.  Seamlessly moving between the languages was far more efficient than trying to look up a sentence in the dictionary one word at a time.

That drove home the concept behind our Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) feature that is integrated into all AMD Opteron^TM four and six core processors.

Much of the overhead of virtualization is from having to translate memory requests between the individual virtual machine and the physical hardware.  In the old world, these translations were handled in the software – an infinitely slower process.

Today, that translation is done in silicon, speeding up the process greatly.  Increasing the speed of memory translation is important because this is one of the biggest bottlenecks for virtualized servers. And as the memory footprint of the average server increases, this becomes even more critical.

Virtualization is one of those IT directions that is not a trendy “flavor of the week.” Virtualization was how we managed computing resources back in the “big iron age” when mainframes, costing millions of dollars were subdivided to provide virtual computing resources. Every department couldn’t afford their own mainframe, so there wasn’t a question about the value of virtualization. As servers became far less expensive, throwing hardware at the problem was a quick fix.  Until we all started running out of space.

With the clear trend back to virtualization, there are hardware implementations of virtualization that can be done to help improve performance and processing efficiency.  RVI is one of them, and in the second half of this year, you should expect to see new systems based on our next generation server platform.  This new AMD platform is designed for “Shanghai” or “Istanbul” processors coupled with the new AMD SR56×0/SP5100 chipset.

This chipset will feature IOMMU, which is another hardware-based virtualization feature. IOMMU allows you to virtualize I/O traffic, enabling greater performance, scalability and efficiency as well as increased security by providing independent virtual I/O channels.

Through IOMMU, again, the I/O communications are translated at the hardware level vs. at the software level, providing greater performance and efficiency.

So as I stumble around like an old server, trying to manually translate the menu and Ramen Jinro, my friend will be able to do it on the fly without even thinking about it. Nothing is lost in translation and it happens so much faster when it is done at the hardware level.  Progress is great on this front, and one day I hope to catch up with the rest of the world.  Hopefully my noodles won’t be cold by then.

John Fruehe is the Director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products 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.