Quoting from the AMD official announcement:
AMD today announced broad software industry support for its upcoming Next-Generation AMD Opteron processor family, which provides the ISV (independent software vendor) and open source software development communities with hardware support for the development of the next evolution of business-class enterprise applications.
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“Customers and partners are demanding solutions that help them achieve business agility and advance their businesses with high-performance IT infrastructure,” said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft Corp. “The Next-Generation AMD Opteron processor, along with current and future versions of Windows Server, will enhance software development and drive further adoption of the latest innovations in security, virtualization and management.”
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VMware’s virtualization platform and AMD Opteron processor-based systems are combined today in some of the most advanced data centers, resulting in significant power savings and unprecedented resource consolidation,” said Brian Byun, vice president of Products and Alliances at VMware. “The Next-Generation AMD Opteron processor includes additional hardware support that further accentuates the benefits of VMware Infrastructure 3 as a true distributed platform for sharing resource transparently across the enterprise.”
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“Back in early 2003, Novell worked alongside AMD to bring the first production-level 64-bit operating system to the enterprise market, and since that time, our collaboration on solutions for the open source community has remained very active,” said Roger Levy, vice president, Open Platform Solutions, at Novell. “AMD’s Next-Generation AMD Opteron processor platform will enable customers to take full advantage of virtualization features in the recently launched SUSE Linux Enterprise 10.”
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AMD plans to announce the availability of the Next-Generation AMD Opteron on August 15, 2006.