Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processors with Direct Connect Architecture and AMD Virtualization™ (AMD-V™) technology power efficient, flexible, and secure server virtualization solutions available today. AMD-V represents a collection of silicon-enabled enhancements that allow common Hypervisor software functions to be performed faster and more efficiently in hardware. AMD-V™ technology enables processor-optimized virtualization, for a more efficient implementation of virtualization environments that can help you to support more users, more transactions and more resource intensive applications in a virtual environment.

Rapid Virtualization Indexing, an enhancement to AMD-V technology in Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, is designed to dramatically increase the performance of virtualized applications while enabling faster switching between virtual machines (VMs), so you can host more VMs per server and maximize the benefits of virtualization.

AMD's Direct Connect Architecture includes an on-die memory controller for optimum memory management – a key performance enabler for virtualization – while HyperTransport™ technology increases platform scalability, throughput and efficiency.

Direct Connect Architecture: Host More Virtual Machines Per Server
AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture provides direct CPU-to-memory, CPU-to-I/O, and CPU-to-CPU connections to streamline server virtualization. 64-bit AMD quad-core processors provide more memory bandwidth and more CPU resources for virtualization than any comparable server processor.

The Integrated Memory Controller is designed to improve performance on memory-intensive virtualization environments through high bandwidth, low latency, and scalable access to memory.

HyperTransport technology optimizes the movement of data and the sharing of resources among VMs for greater system scalability.

Rapid Virtualization Indexing: Better Performance For Virtualized Environments
Rapid Virtualization Indexing allows virtual machines to more directly manage memory, helping improve performance on many virtualized applications. Utilizing on-die silicon resources rather than software, Rapid Virtualization Indexing can reduce Hypervisor cycles and the associated performance penalty that is commonly associated with virtualization.

Rapid Virtualization Indexing is also designed to minimize the “world-switch time” – time spent switching from one virtual machine to another – by 25% for greater application responsiveness.

Tagged Translation Look-Aside Buffer: Increased Responsiveness For Virtualized Environments
Unique to AMD Opteron processors, the Tagged Translation Look-aside Buffer (TLB) allows for faster switching times between virtual machines by maintaining a mapping to the VMs individual memory spaces. Competing solutions can’t distinguish one VM's memory space from another’s, resulting in additional memory management overhead and reduced responsiveness when switching between virtual machines.

Device Exclusion Vector: For More Efficient Security
The Device Exclusion Vector (DEV) – another AMD exclusive – acts like a traffic cop, controlling access to virtual machine memory based on permission, isolating virtual machines for secure operation.

The DEV performs these security checks in hardware, rather than software, for greater efficiency by creating Protection Domains that deny memory access for unauthorized requests from external devices, such as hard disks, network controllers, etc.

Learn more about Third-Generation AMD Opteron™ processors.

Features and Benefits:

• AMD64 Technology
• Direct Connect Architecture
• Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ Processor Upgradeability
• Enhanced Performance-per-Watt

• Benchmarks
• Competitive Comparisons

• Product Brief
• Key Architectural Features