AMD deal with Intel a factor in plant's future

MALTA -- Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Chairman Hector Ruiz will surely
face questions today about the company's plans for a $3.2 billion
computer chip factory here at the Luther Forest Technology Campus.
AMD
has yet to officially commit to the site. The company's financial
condition and secretive "asset smart" strategy, designed to save money,
are key to the decision.
But a technology-sharing agreement that AMD has with its main rival,
Intel Corp., also looms large in the decision, analysts say.
AMD
and Intel have had some form of the so-called patent cross-license
agreement in place since 1976. Such agreements are common in the
industry, and AMD pays Intel royalties for the use of Intel technology.
The
latest version was signed in 2001. It is set to expire at the end of
2010, before AMD would likely finish construction of its Malta factory,
known as Fab 4X.
Morningstar Inc. analyst Andy Ng said the
agreement is key to AMD's manufacture of mainstay x86 processors that
power personal computers and servers. He said AMD likely can
renegotiate before the expiration.
"They need it," Ng said of AMD. "This agreement has been going on for a while. Chances are, it will go through."
Ng also said Intel, the world's No. 1 maker of x86 chips, might run into antitrust issues if it refuses to renegotiate.
AMD
already has filed an antitrust suit against Intel, accusing the company
of selling chips at a discount to customers in exchange for agreements
that they not buy from AMD.
Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said
Tuesday the company would not talk about the agreement with AMD or
whether it will be renegotiated.
"We never comment about negotiations with anyone," he said. "As far as we're concerned, that's all confidential."
An AMD spokesman could not be reached for comment.
Ng
and other industry observers note the agreement can be canceled if AMD
is acquired, and language in the agreement indicates that the license
cannot be transferred to a third party.
That means if AMD's
asset-smart strategy includes the spinoff or sale of its manufacturing
operations -- something many analysts have said is a possibility --
then the agreement will also have to be amended.
"There could be hurdles there," Ng said.

From: http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=715462&category=BUSINESS

HP takes the top spot on VMware VMmark scores for 16- and 32-cores

VMware's VMmark virtual machine performance benchmark
tool can be used as a marketing tool for hardware vendors. HP recently
submitted the highest VMmark scores for both 16- and 32-core hardware
platforms.

TAGS: General News

On
the heels of HP's recent strong earnings announcement, the company's
Enterprise Servers and Storage (ESS) business was happy to report that
it captured what it describes as yet another important milestone:
achieving the top VMmark scores published on the VMware VMmark site for
16- and 32-core x86 servers.

It was just over a year ago that VMware introduced its virtualization performance benchmarking tool,
VMmark. According to VMware, traditional benchmarks were developed to
measure the performance associated with running a single workload on a
server. These benchmarks do not capture system behavior of multiple
virtual machines or the ability of a server to support multiple
simultaneous workloads on the same server. VMmark is the first
benchmarking system that measures the scalability of heterogeneous
virtualized workloads and provides a consistent methodology so
benchmark results can be compared across different virtualization
platforms. As a result, companies can use this information to make
appropriate hardware choices and compare the performance and
scalability of different virtualization platforms.

HP said that its HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server achieved the x86
industry's No. 1 virtualization performance result on the VMmark
benchmark. The DL785, an 8-socket server, achieved a score of 21.88@16
tiles or 96 virtual machines. HP said this is "the highest
virtualization performance and largest number of virtual machines on an
x86 server to-date." To be fair, it looks as though HP is the only
server company to post a 32-core score to the VMmark site.

The HP ProLiant DL585 G5 also currently holds the top result for
4-socket servers, achieved back on Aug. 5 of this year. It achieved a
score of 14.74@10 tiles, beating out Dell's PowerEdge R90x series.

Dell on the other hand currently dominates the 4- and 8-core VMmark
scores with its 2-socket PowerEdge series competing against scores from
Sun Microsystems.

When asked what was so interesting with capturing the top VMware
VMmark scores for these larger machines, HP said it signals to the
industry and to customers that ProLiant is the right choice for
virtualization. And they stated, "We have a full portfolio of hardware,
software and solutions to help customers realize the benefits of a
virtualized datacenter which will help improve server utilization while
lowering costs."

When asked to what they attribute these successful scores when compared to their competition, HP said:

"We're building servers with customer needs in mind. The servers
were architected to provide the memory, I/O and storage that running
multiple virtual machines require so customers can meet the performance
and reliability standards they demand. And from a broader
virtualization standpoint, we've made significant advancements in our
capabilities -- taking the guesswork out of planning/provisioning your
physical and virtual resources. Customers need a better view of
opportunities to increase server utilization and improve application
performance by shifting workloads to servers with free capacity."

"HP takes capacity planning to new levels with its new Insight
Dynamics-VSE offering which allows customers to automatically analyze
and optimize server capacity and power use. By gathering thousands of
data points from physical and virtual resources, data is gathered every
5 minutes to create a clear record of server utilization - memory,
processor, I/O and energy consumption. Then, using HP Smart Solver, the
software identifies the best fit for workloads and highlights ops to
consolidate servers to improve utilization and cut power consumption.
When you need to deploy a new workload, the built in 5 star rating
system lets customers instantly see the best place to put the workload
in their existing infrastructure. Like having a team of PhDs behind
you, HP ID-VSE takes the tedious research and guesswork out of
traditional capacity planning."

You can view the current VMmark test scores on VMware's Web site.

Credit : http://weblog.infoworld.com/