Stefan Mileschin

AMD announced that it has been courting Microsoft behind the scenes while Windows Server 2012 was under development to make sure its Opteron chips re "ideally suited to deliver unparalleled server price performance".

AMD appears to be aiming for the value-for-money crowd, claiming that its processors deliver "compelling" total cost of ownership for its customers. Redmond and AMD, the company said, have made sure their hardware and software play nice so they can handle the usual demands of the modern business computing environmen: that is, the continued shift towards cloud computing, virtualising, and increasing ever larger amounts of data.

AMD cited Microsoft's use of AMD powered servers in its Windows Azure public cloud as proof that the two get along. It pointed to Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V's capabilities for supporting up to 64 virtual processors and one terabyte of memory per virtual machines, as well as support for up to 4,000 virtual machines in a cluster.

"The close association between AMD and Microsoft has deep roots," a statement to the press read. That may be so, but WinAmd doesn't have quite the same ring to it as Wintel. Anyway, AMD boasted that Windows Server 2012 can make the most of Opteron 4200 and 6200 Series processors, and Piledriver families will have it in mind as well.

GM of servers at AMD, Suresh Gopalkrishnan, said that the next-gen Piledriver based cores will take "further advantage of the advance in Windows Server 2012 to address customers' growing needs around virtualisation, cloud computing, and managing increasingly large sets of data."

http://news.techeye.net/chips/amd-em...ws-server-2012