AMD-Based HP Servers Shatter Performance Record by 40 Percent

BARCELONA, SPAIN--(Marketwire - Oct 9, 2012) - VMworld 2012 -- AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that a cluster of HP ProLiant BL465c Gen8 servers utilizing AMD Opteron^™ 6200 Series processors has achieved the highest VMmark^® 2.1 score ever posted, representing a 40 percent increase over the next best score. VMmark is VMware's popular multi-server benchmarking tool that measures platform performance and scalability of virtualized environments. The record score of 59.99 at 62 tiles displaced a score of 42.79 at 36 tiles -- a 40 percent increase in performance and a 72 percent increase in the number of virtual machines (VMs).

For the benchmark, HP used 16 HP ProLiant BL465c Gen8 blades, the highest volume selling blade in the world, each running two 16-core AMD Opteron 6278 processors yielding a total of 496 VMs with an average of 31 VMs per blade at a cost of $371 per virtual machine¹. HP BladeSystem, the industry's only Converged Infrastructure architected for any workload from client to cloud, offers the performance and scalability needed to support an ideal virtualization platform for IT professionals who are moving to dense virtualization environments as a foundation for building both public and private clouds.

"The new VMware benchmark is a further indication that AMD Opteron processors are ideally suited for virtualization," said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, corporate vice president and general manager of Servers, AMD. "Servers using high core-count AMD Opteron 6200 series processors provide outstanding performance, reliability, scalability and affordable efficiency for virtualized IT environments and cloud computing."

AMD Opteron-based servers also offer superior price/performance while reducing capital expense (capex) by up to 30 percent² versus comparable solutions. These findings, based on earlier published VMmark 2.1 benchmarks of high-end systems, can amount to $130,000 in savings² or more for a single server rack, enabling IT decision makers to greatly reduce capex and total cost of ownership (TCO).

AMD will be showcasing its virtualization solutions at VMworld 2012 through October 12 at Barcelona's Fira Barcelona Gran Via, hall 7, level 0, stand G312. AMD will be demonstrating an HP ProLiant DL385p Gen8 server with VMware vSphere^™ and View, the graphics path capabilities of vSphere with AMD FirePro^™ graphics boards, a static SeaMicro SM10000^™ server, as well as the AMD Opteron and Intel Ivy Bridge modules for the newly announced SeaMicro SM15000^™ system.

About AMD
AMD (NYSE: AMD) is a semiconductor design innovator leading the next era of vivid digital experiences with its groundbreaking AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) that power a wide range of computing devices. AMD's server computing products are focused on driving industry-leading cloud computing and virtualization environments. AMD's superior graphics technologies are found in a variety of solutions ranging from game consoles, PCs to supercomputers. For more information, visit http://www.amd.com.

AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, AMD Opteron, SeaMicro SM10000 and combinations thereof, are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. VMware® VMmark® is a product of VMware, Inc. Other names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.

¹ HP ProLiant Gen8 BL465c blade pricing of $11,494 configured on www.hp.com as of 10/5/2012 with two 16-core AMD Opteron™ processors, model 6278, and 256GB of memory (16x16GB 2 rank x4 PC3L-10600R-9). Configuration matches VMmark 2.1 disclosure document for the referenced score http://www.vmware.com/a/assets/vmmark/pdf/2012-10-05-HP-BL465cG8.pdf

² Based on price and performance evaluations of systems with VMmark 2.1 scores posted as of 8/5/2012. Systems includes 2 x AMD Opteron™ processors Model 6284SE in HP DL385 Gen8 server posting a VMmark 2.1 score of 8.31 @ 8 Tiles per 2 host systems with 32 VMs per server and including 128GB (8x16 GB DDR3-1600) memory, 1x15K 450GB SAS HD, and base warranty at a cost of $8,908 for server hardware and $6,990 for VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus software; 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2690 processors in HP DL380p Gen 8 server posting a VMmark 2.1 score of 11.05 @ 10 Tiles for two host systems with 40 VMs per server with 256GB (16x16 GB DDR3-1600) memory, 1x15K 450GB SAS HD, base warranty at a cost of $15,525 for server hardware and $6990 for VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus software. System prices as of 8/5/2012 from www.hp.com and software price as of 8/5/2012 from www.vmware.com. 30% cap-ex expenditure reduction is based on comparison of server costs including software. SVR-215