Whether it is for the purpose of consolidation or making more efficient use of powerful servers, virtualization has become an increasingly relevant area for businesses around the world. This certainly pleases AMD, who recently saw a platform based upon their processors earn the number one spot in VMWare's virtualization benchmark, VMmark. If AMD is sore about losing to Intel in desktop performance, they are certainly making up for it in virtualization, taking the second and third spots as well.

The system that earned AMD the number one spot was an Opteron-based server totaling 32 cores. This system scored admirably running 32 threads using VMware ESX. And while this is a synthetic benchmark, it is one designed specifically to stress a system and test how it would handle a virtualized environment. With AMD going through some rough times nowadays, this should count for something if it can help them grab a greater portion of the server market.