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AMD has rethought its roadmap and, given its limited resources and near-death experience with Barcelona, it's scrubbing Montreal, the eight-core chip that was supposed to follow Shanghai, the chip after Barcelona, and substituting a six-core part code named Istanbul to be followed by a 12-core part called Magny-Cours. Speculation has also been rife this week that AMD would finally tease out its so-called asset-lite manufacturing plans, some kind of cost-saving outsourcing scheme, at its shareholders meeting Thursday, chatter that has flamed into speculation that it will break in two - a manufacturing business and a chip design and development operation.

A new scalable virtualization server is now available from Dell and based on the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, AMD announced. Enterprise customers interested in consolidating server infrastructure may turn to two new virtualization servers from Dell utilizing Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, including the Dell PowerEdge R905 which set a new standard in VMmark performance testing with 60 virtual machines. The new Dell servers take advantage of AMD Direct Connect Architecture to reduce bottlenecks, minimize latency and increase the performance of virtualized applications to maximize the benefits of virtualization.

The VMware Fusion team announced the release of VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 for public download. VMware also announced VMware Fusion 2.0 will be a free downloadable upgrade for all VMware Fusion 1.x users. VMware Fusion Beta 1 ships with new features.

Dell will take a big giant step out ahead of HP and IBM in the virtualization sweepstakes when it announces that it is OEMing PAN, Egenera's data center virtualization and management software. Egenera, which has been doing virtualization way longer than most people, claims PAN is the epitome of what IDC calls 'Virtualization 2.0,' the next step beyond simple VMware-style single server virtualization replete with scalability, faster provisioning, high availability, disaster recovery and resource balancing.

Emulex announced that EMC has qualified the Emulex LightPulse LPe12000 family of 8Gb/s Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) for the EMC CLARiiON, EMC Celerra and EMC Symmetrix networked storage system families. Emulex 8Gb/s HBAs, which are available from EMC through EMC Select, provide customers with new performance, advanced virtualization and security features, while maintaining backward compatibility with existing 4Gb/s and 2Gb/s Fibre Channel products.

3PAR announced that a recently released report by the Taneja Group defines and analyzes a new category of next-generation Fibre Channel storage systems from vendors including 3PAR. The report forecasts revenue growth for next-generation Fibre Channel storage systems for the period between 2007 and 2011 and identifies shifts in the Fibre Channel storage market that Taneja believes are largely responsible for driving revenue growth for this new segment.

DataCore announced that JMR Construction has become a DataCore SANmelody customer courtesy of DataCore partner Integral Networks. VMware and DataCore serve as a way forward for the DataCore partner and customer alike. The combination provides a cost effective alternative that made it practical for JMR to save by not having to invest in additional, physical servers.

OpenOffice.org has released a beta version of its open-source application suite that doesn't require Mac users to install X11, a Unix windowing environment.

Xceed launched Xceed Upload for Silverlight, the commercial offering in support of Microsoft's promising new Silverlight technology. The product is available now for purchase or as a fully functional 45-day trial on Xceed's website. Xceed Upload for Silverlight lets developers add upload capabilities to any Silverlight 2 Beta 1 application. All upload operations are asynchronous; as a result, the Web page hosting the Silverlight application remains perfectly responsive and usable throughout the transfer.

At Java One this week Sun has been selling its year-old-but-still-upcoming - and definitely late-to-the-party - Adobe AIR- and Microsoft Silverlight-competitive JavaFX Rich Client environment as a potential revenue-generator capable of putting ads on mobile applications and JavaFX Script, its newfangled high-performance GUI declarative scripting language, as the way to build consumer next-generation RIAs for desktops, mobiles, TV and other consumer devices.