Dell jumps on the Barcelona bandwagon

AMD said Dell is now offering five quad-core Opteron server platforms. The long-awaited chip has also finally received VMware certification.

Dell coming on board and shoving Barcelona into its offerings, is good news for AMD, bringing the overall number of OEM AMD quad-core systems to 13.

Dell’s website says its Poweredge servers are now chock filled with Barcelona. It has bunged the quad-core Opterons into its Poweredge SC1435, 2970, M605 blade server and 6950 platforms, not to mention in the Poweredge T605 tower server.

With VMware completing its qualification of quad-core Opterons, AMD wants to become more of a data centre player in virtualised environments. Ever the optimist, Randy Allen, AMD server and workstation vice president, noted that Dell’s new Barcelona offerings, in combination with VMware’s qualification, " are important milestones for business customers looking for an ideal platform for virtualisation”. Better late than never, admittedly.

Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products at VMware also added that customers could “now combine the Rapid Virtualization Indexing, I/O and memory bandwidth capabilities of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor with the VMware virtualization platform to help reduce capital and operating expenses, ensure business continuity, strengthen security and go green.”

Dell’s announcement comes just one week after AMD announced that its quad-core Opteron chips (Barcelona) for servers and workstations were finally ready to ship in volume after months of being held back because of delays due to problems with the translation look aside buffers (TLB) in the L3 cache shared between all the cores on the chip.

HP were the first to say it would be using Barcelona extensively in its product line and Sun and IBM are also predicted to get on board with new Barcelona supporting chips any day now. µ

See Also
AMD veep remains optimistic

AMD confirms ten percent job cuts

AMD CTO Phil Hester resigns