It was with some waffling that we chose the AMD Opteron 6200 "Interlagos"-series CPU for a Technology of the Year award. It's not an out-of-the-box winner unless you're running the latest and greatest version of your chosen OS or virtualization hypervisor. Even then, "Interlagos" may not perform as well as you think it should. However, there's tons of promise in the newest incarnation of Opteron. Armed with up to 16 cores and incorporating arguably the most significant internal redesign since the original Opteron's NUMA architecture, "Interlagos" is poised to go far. Once operating system and virtualization vendors latch on to the new instructions and take full advantage of the new platform, the performance of threaded applications and workloads will soar.

-- Paul Venezia