AMD To Join The Virtualization Party By 2006

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chip maker will include its Pacifica technology as a standard part of its Opteron and Athlon processors, banking on large enterprises wanting to tap into the technology's partitioning capabilities.

AMD processors with virtualization will be publicly available by mid-2006, according to the company, likely within months of a competing offering from Intel, Santa Clara, Calif., which last year announced it is also working on the technology.

Margaret Lewis, AMD's enterprise software strategist, said adoption of AMD's virtualization technology probably would be found in higher-end enterprises first, but stopped short of saying it had mainframe-replacement potential.

"What we're doing is bringing virtualization to the x86 world," Lewis said.

AMD's technology would compete with Intel's forthcoming "Vanderpool" technology, as well as software-based offerings such as VMWare. The technology allows systems to be partitioned and enabled to run multiple operating systems.

Lewis said AMD likely would make its virtualization technology a standard feature with its processors. Intel, meanwhile, has suggested its newer technologies, including Vanderpool and Intel Active Management Technology, could be offered with processors at some premium.

Todd Swank, director of marketing at Nor-Tech, a Burnsville, Minn.-based system builder, said the success of virtualization technology on the x86 platform will require a lot of effort by both manufacturers and the channel.

"It's going to take education for the average reseller out there," Swank said. "A good percentage of resellers have a good feel for the PC, the workstation, the [current] small-network environment.

"The nice thing is, over the past four years Intel, AMD and Microsoft have done a nice job of working with the channel to teach people" about newer technologies, he added.