Intel is backing a start-up, 3Leaf, that depends on AMD technology to do what's it's doing. Intel led the stealth outfit's $20 million B round last September, bringing total investment to $32.5 million.

3Leaf, which just broke cover with a box called the V-8000, fancies itself challenging Egenera, according to CEO Bob Quinn. He calls 3Leaf "the Egenera of commodity products," and he's gonna have ex-Egenera people peddling the box. Savvis, Egenera's largest customer, has been a beta site. The V-8000, a stage one product, is a 2U virtual I/O server, which explains the "V" in its name and why 3Leaf is thinking Egenera, which wrote the book on virtualization.

The appliance, so to speak, is built around two dual-core AMD Opterons. 3Leaf exploits AMD's virtualization properties and licensed its HyperTransport technology. Heck, Quinn claims to have given AMD the idea for its Torrenza third-party co-processor scheme. By the middle of next year 3Leaf expects to add a second product that virtualizes memory and processing but that will take both a piece of Torrenza-style silicon code named Aqua that plugs into an Opteron socket and another round of funding.

When 3Leaf puts the V-8000 and the Aqua thing together what should emerge is a cluster of x86 servers, possible tens of thousands of cores, functioning in unison like an SMP or NUMA machine and running multiple applications and multiple operating systems.

3Leaf thinks it's mastered the technique for delivering mainframe-class availability and resiliency to a bunch of commodity servers by virtualizing their I/O subsystem

Basically it consolidates them into a single scale-out resource and then partitions and repurposes them into a virtual scale-up server real-time.