AMD will release its brand new quad-core Opteron processor today, according to all the media who got a press release early.
Those of us who told the world plus dog about the Barcelona chip launch in June and even found a sales video last did not get a copy so we were very excited to hear about it from outfits who broke embargos to tell you the news "first".

Like I said, we have never heard of this 'Barcelona' gizmo before, but according to CNET, it will pull AMD's nadgers from the fire after CEO Hector Ruiz will formally unveil the quad-core Opteron chip during an event in San Francisco Monday evening. If CNET is to be believed we got the event launch all wrong and are sending our top hack, Paul Hales to AMD's Barcelona launch in Spain this morning. Still he has not had a holiday since last week.

Apparently, Barcelona will be AMD's first chip with four processing cores, which is four small brains doing the work of one big one, in case you didn't know.

AMD said says that Barcelona is "the world’s most advanced x86 processor ever designed" and is the "first native x86 quad-core microprocessor".

The chip can "deliver breakthrough capabilities to customers in a time of dramatically escalating performance-per-watt emphasis".

VMware is launching a new, embedded version of its flagship ESX Server hypervisor, along with a disaster recovery tool and an update for its virtual desktop broker.

The so-called thin hypervisor, named ESX Server 3i, will be integrated in servers from Dell, IBM, and HP, according to VMware, with unnamed others to follow. The plan is that building virtualisation into the hardware simplifies deployment and management of virtual infrastructure, because it removes the installation step.

ESX Server 3i partitions a physical server into multiple secure and portable virtual machines said VMware. The vendor claimed that users will have the hypervisor up and running "in a matter of minutes". According to Tommy Armstrong, VMware's European marketing manager , 3i allows a company use their preferred hardware OEM and, once booted, the server asks for the admin password and IP address, and is ready to run virtual machines.

VMware claimed that 3i was "the only hypervisor on the market today that does not incorporate a general-purpose operating system, thus freeing it from the many challenges involved in maintaining a general purpose OS." 3i occupies only 32MB because VMware has removed the OS without affecting the functionality of the hypervisor. VMware reckoned it achieved this by removing the service console, which Armstrong reckoned reduced the footprint by 98 percent. Instead of managing the system locally, it can be accessed via VirtualCenter, VMware's management tool for virtualised infrastructure.

As well as simplicity, VMware's claimed that the benefits of this approach include reliability and security.

“Today, VMware is ushering in a new era where virtualisation is not separate from hardware, it is simply how industry-standard servers operate,” said marketing manager Raghu Raghuram. ”We have worked with our partners to integrate ESX Server directly into their hardware. Now customers can turn on their servers and boot directly into a fully-functioning hypervisor to rapidly and easily realise the benefits of virtualisation. We expect this advance to simplify virtualisation and make it accessible to customers of all sises.”

According to the company, users can deploy VMware's Infrastructure 3 (VI3) products on top of 3i, including VirtualCenter, VMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), High Availability (HA), and VMware Consolidated Backup.

Hardware vendors are expected to begin shipping ESX Server 3i within their products by the end of 2007 and over the course of 2008. IBM has already pre-announced such a device.

Microsoft is releasing its Windows Home Server software to manufacturers Monday paving the way for home server devices based on Microsoft's software to be available this fall. Iomega today also announces it becomes the latest to offer hardware that will run Windows Home Server software. Other hardware partners previously announced to offer Windows Home Server devices are Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, LaCie, and Medion.

Iomega this fall says it will sell a user expandable home server for consumers with the ability to add up to four hard drives based on Windows Home Server software. No official word on pricing or exact dates for availability.

Windows Home Server is Microsoft's solution to bringing order to cluttered digital lives. Microsoft is targeting households that want to share storage among multiple PCs. Various models of home server products will provide automatic backup of connected PCs, sharing of digital content between network-attached devices (PCs, Zune media player, or Xbox game console), remote access to data, and storage expansion.

A new technical committee within Ecma International will produce a formal standard for XML Paper Specification (XPS) - Microsoft's alternative to Adobe's widely-used (though not fully open) PDF.

Once complete, the technical committee may offer the standard to its counterparts at ISO or IEC for broader adoption.

Open standards advocates have come out against what they see as an attempt to give a proprietary standard the imprimatur of a supposedly independent standards body.

Bob Sutor, vice president, open source and standards at IBM, commented in his blog "The standard must be compatible with Microsoft's implementation, which is the only implementation. How open. How independent. How collaborative. What do you think? Should we just save time and money and let Microsoft simply define international standards for us based on what they put in their products?"

Similarly, "The best reason for not approving OOXML/Ecma 376 as a global standard is that it will encourage other vendors to push for multiple, unnecessary standards rather than achieving consensus on a single standard that will best serve the needs of all stakeholders, and not individual proprietary vendors," blogged intellectual property lawyer Andrew Updegrove.

"[P]erpetuating one monopolistic market position after another seems wholly incompatible with the role of a global standards body, tasked with protecting the interests of all stakeholders," he added, "If OOXML, and now Microsoft XML Paper Specification, each sail through Ecma and are then adopted by ISO/IEC JTC1, then I think that we might as well declare "game over" for open standards."

Barcelona promises to be as much as 70% faster than its predecessors when running some database applications, yet will consume the same amount of power, according to AMD. With some floating-point operations, which often are used to crunch complex scientific data, the chip is expected to run 40% faster.

Initially, Barcelona will be released in two versions, standard and low-powered. Neither will exceed clock speeds of 2.0GHz. This is slower than some of Intel's quad-core Xeon 5300 chips, codenamed 'Clovertown,' which were released last year. Xeon X5355, for example, is currently shipping and runs at 2.66GHz.

AMD said another higher-frequency version of Barcelona would ship in the fourth quarter sometime.

"AMD has prioritized production of our low-power and standard-power products because our customers and ecosystem demand it, and we firmly believe that the introduction of our native quad-core AMD Opteron processor will deliver on the promise of the highest levels of performance-per-watt the industry has ever seen," said AMD server and workstation VP Randy Allen, in a statement.

Barcelona is being touted by AMD as the first "native" quad-core chip because all four cores are on a single silicon die, compared to Intel's quad-core devices, which essentially are two dual-core chips packaged side by side.

AMD contends that having a processor built from the ground up to have four cores will enable higher performance.

Intel has said its two-by-dual-core design enabled it to keep costs low while it works on a single-chip quad-core using the next-generation 45-nanometer manufacturing process, which promises to help keep power dissipation low. Intel's forthcoming 45-nm quad-core processor, codenamed 'Harpertown,' is expected to launch this year.

Barcelona, at least initially, will be manufactured in the larger 65-nm node. And this doesn't seem be a factor, at this point in time, given Barcelona's thermal profile so far also seems low.

But it is worth noting AMD has only recently moved to the 65-nm node. The general rule is that the smaller the manufacturing node, the lower the manufacturing cost and the higher the performance.

AMD did not release Barclelona pricing.