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 machine. 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 percent versus comparable solutions. These findings, based on earlier published VMmark 2.1 benchmarks of high-end systems, can amount to $130,000 in savings 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.