AMD Boosts Datacenter Efficiency with Best Performance per Watt for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005

Business Wire, Nov 9, 2005

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- AMD Opteron(TM) processors and Microsoft's 64-bit software technology offer customers large and small increased performance, efficiency and cost savings

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced a variety of customers are embracing the powerful combination of Dual-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processors, Windows Server 2003 x64 Editions, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and Visual Studio 2005 to improve business processes. Customers who demand leading-edge performance are rapidly recognizing and embracing the speed, price and efficiency advantages offered by AMD64 and Microsoft x64 innovations.

"As evidenced by AMD's growing market share and record-setting benchmarks, AMD Opteron processors provide the highest level of performance that businesses can buy today," said Ben Williams, vice president, Commercial Business, AMD. "Together with allies like Microsoft, AMD is enabling solutions that can help customers realize new-levels of performance, efficiency and cost savings. This is enabling businesses large and small to use AMD technology to gain a competitive advantage in the market."

As indicated by top scores in industry standard benchmarks and testimonials from numerous users, AMD64 technology helps Microsoft SQL Server 2005 customers gain a competitive advantage when handling critical business functions. In fact, HP ProLiant DL585 server, powered by Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors Model 880, is the only currently shipping server to break the TPC-C 200K transaction score for four-way x86 servers. Additionally, Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors with Direct Connect Architecture offer these significant performance gains while delivering the industry's best performance-per-watt. Together with Microsoft SQL Server 2005's advanced performance and scalability features, companies can rapidly conduct transactions, serve information and move data quickly due to the memory addressability provided by Microsoft Windows x64 Edition operating systems and the memory bandwidth of AMD Opteron processors.

"64-bit technology enables multi-gigabyte main memory configurations that in turn enable huge performance gains for database management software," observed Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. "Until recently, these performance advantages were available only to users of systems based on proprietary processors and operating systems. Today's release of SQL Server 2005 for x64 systems, combined with April's release of Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition, allows users to retain the economic benefits of systems based on industry-standards like the AMD Opteron(TM) processor and still gain the performance benefits of 64-bit DBMS software operation."

Agnostic Media

Agnostic Media, Inc. offers an integrated, comprehensive, and cohesive platform for managing and distributing digital media. One of its specialties is transcoding video and film--converting data into a variety of different formats in order to be distributed and viewed within different mediums such as televisions, PCs and mobile devices.

"Transcoding is a time, storage, and CPU-intensive process; with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor as the core of our systems, we can transcode a two-and-a-half hour movie in 10 minutes, which makes our customers ecstatic" said Jason Turner, chief executive officer, Agnostic Media. "We have also seen outstanding database performance running SQL Server 2005 on AMD64. We're experiencing no less than a 2x performance increase in SQL Server 2005 running on 64-bit dual-core AMD processors. These performance gains allow us to differentiate our services from the competition and are helping us secure new business at an extremely rapid rate."

Microsoft Corp. Volume Licensing Business Tools and Analytics Group

Microsoft Corp. Worldwide Licensing and Pricing group is responsible for creating the tools and analytics that support the company's sales representatives in the field and the executives who make decisions about the pricing and licensing strategies. The group, which handles Microsoft's largest customer relationships, was responsible for driving $15 billion (U.S.) of business in 2004--about half the company's total revenue. To handle this volume of business and offer flexible programs across a broad range of products, they developed the Easy Pricing and Estimation Tool (EZPET). This solution enabled Microsoft to gain unprecedented visibility into sales data.

"The power of 64-bit computing is helping us deliver the best customer and partner experience," said Brent Callinicos, corporate vice president, World Wide Licensing & Pricing, Microsoft Corp. "Prior to Microsoft's investment in 64-bit tools, processing the large volume of data to generate a comprehensive price quote could sometimes take hours. To remedy this, we developed EZPET with Visual Studio 2005, running on AMD Opteron processor-based servers with 64-bit SQL Server 2005. The application improved performance by 99 percent and saved the company $27 million in six months. The results were so strong that we enhanced the application with deal tracking and reporting capability running on Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor-based servers."