VMware does not sport Barcelona features

THE VMWARE REP here in Barcelona was openly praising the performance of AMD's Barcelona processors, but there was a small whoopsie at the end of presentation, during the Q&A session.

When asked what how VMware is supporting, Steve Jackson (official title Director for Strategic Partnerships, VMware EMEA) stated that at this moment, VMware does not support Nested Paging, one of key features of AMD V marchitecture. This includes ESX 3i, a product released yesterday, just in time for AMD quad-core Opteron launch.

Sadly, support for Nested Paging Tables will not be present in VMware offering until next-gen ESX, set to come to market at unannounced time. All in all, quite usual situation for a software vendor - new hardware shows up, and it takes time to support it, regardless of how much time it took for a product to show up.

On the other hand, the reason just might be the late delivery of Barcelona silicon, so guys and gals at VMware lost the time to implement all of the features in a shipping version.

AMD and VMware still claim hefty performance increase from Santa Rosa to Barcelona, with quad-core Opteron 2360 SE (unreleased 2.5 GHz part) being 127% faster than fastest Santa Rosa processor, the Opteron 2224 SE (3.2 GHz). Oddly enough, there was an complete absence of blue bars, so only processor platform that quad-core was compared to was Santa Rosa, or the old dual-core K8. µ