Is a six-minute discussion about data center consolidation boring? Maybe, but if you want to hear a cogent disposition of the salient issues -- like power and cooling considerations, virtualization, and how to get the most server bang for your buck -- click ahead to see my talk with AMD VP for commercial business Kevin Knox. But whatever you do, don't tell Kevin servers are "hot."

OK, it's a minor joke, but the point is that power and cooling are obviously huge items on the agenda of IT managers charged with stuffing racks of heavy-duty computing power into space- and electricity-constrained data centers. So a rep from a processor vendor, like our friend Kevin, is quick to make the point that the whole purpose of new processors like AMD's Opterons is that there are many low-power models to choose from. This speaks volumes to the issue of reining in the bucks you're gonna pay for electricity to power and cool your data center.

AMD has more skin in this game than ever before, because it recently revamped its architecture. The new design incorporates enhancements like new instructions, improved floating-point execution units, faster data transfer between floating-point and general-purpose registers, and 1-GB paging, to name a few. It's also optimized to make AMD's hardware-based virtualization technology run faster. I describe the whole deal in my article, Inside AMD's Phenom And Opteron Quad-Core Architectures.

Back to consolidation: Kevin and I sat down in front of the camera recently, and our six-minute chat (admittedly, twice as long as the usual vid) gives you, I think, a nice summary of the issues mentioned above. Usually, like I said, this stuff can be pretty boring. Not so much this time, though. Watch it and see if you don't agree.

To see the first part of my video chat with Kevin, where he talks about upcoming quad-core Opterons, see AMD To Ship Bug-Free Barcelona.

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