Now that virtualization has become a key driver of x64 server sales, the ability to live-migrate workloads from machines using older chip generation to newer and future ones is important to data centers - which is why AMD's latest nerd porn demonstrates its Opteron architecture performing inter-generational migrations.

The company's future twelve-shooter Magny-Cours Opteron processor, due in 2010's Opteron 6000 series servers using the G34 socket and related chipset, is featured in the latest AMD video.

Magny-Cours, by the way, is not really a twelve-shooter as much as it's two six-shooters sharing the same holster.

The demo stars Ron Meyers, product marketing manager for AMD's server and workstation business, and puts VMware's latest ESX Server 4.0 hypervisor on a bunch of different Opteron boxes from Dell, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard. A video workload running on a system using the old two-core Rev E Opterons from a few years back is live-migrated to a new system using the six-core Istanbul Opterons.

Then, before the video even gets warm on the Istanbul box, Meyers live-migrates it using the VMotion feature of ESX Server onto a prototype Opteron 6000 system using the Magny-Cours chips.
youtube video

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08...urs_migration/