By Joab Jackson, IDG News Service
Open-source enterprise software company Red Hat has updated its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to take full advantage of the latest spoils from the heated microprocessor battle between Advanced Micro Devices and Intel.

RHEL version 5.5, released Wednesday, has been reconfigured for Intel’s just-released eight-core Nehalem-EX and AMD’s almost-as-recently released 12-core “Magny-Cours” Opteron 6100 Series processors, said Tim Burke, Red Hat vice president for platform engineering.

The software also supports the IBM eight-core Power7 processors, released in February. “This is a great time for the next version of RHEL to hit the market,” said Pund-IT analyst Charles King. This latest round in the continued proliferation of cores within AMD, IBM and Intel processors represents an “inflection point” for the industry, one that could spur a lot of data-center server consolidation, through the use, at least in part, of virtualization, he said.

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