Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) ProLiant DL585 G5 with AMD’s Opteron processor is the top performer for 16-core systems on VMmark’s list. It is also used in HP’s 32 core, eight socket Proliant DL785 on VMmarks list, which achieved a score of 21.88@16 tiles or 96 virtual machines.

These results from AMD based systems aren’t surprising, since AMD Opteron’s virtualization assist technology has received high praise from VMware. One VMware engineer called AMD’s Nested Page Table (NPT) technology the answer to virtualizing large workloads.

Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI), a feature of AMD’s third-generation Opteron, includes NPT, is designed to offer near-native performance of virtualized applications and allows fast switching between virtual machines (VMs.)

Intel Corp. has announced a technology similar to NPT, called Extended Page Tables (EPT), which will be available in its next-generation eight-core microarchitecture, code-named “Nehalem.” Nehalem is slated for production later this year