VMware has announced that AMD has come tops in its virtual benchmarks for  x86 servers.

AMD's Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based HP ProLiant DL585 G5 came on top of the benchmarking process meaning AMD now holds the top three spots on the 16-core VMmark benchmark.

A spokesAMD claimed that the latest result is further proof that Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors are better at running virtualisation operation than other chips.

Apparently the reason for the good score is the Opteron's Rapid Virtualization Indexing which allows near-native performance of virtualised software while enabling fast switching between virtual machines.

Of course, AMD is being measured using the VMmark 1.1 consolidation benchmark, released by VMware in May 2008, includes several workloads that take advantage of the benefits of RVI. So it is probably not that surprising AMD did well in the testing. X