Power Management:

AMD worked closely with Microsoft to support a new AMD product-specific power management driver in Windows 7. This in-box driver supports older processors as well as the latest generation AMD Opteron processor and AMD Phenom II processor. In addition to the power management driver, AMD collaborated with Microsoft to fine tune default power policy parameters that control power state transitions to help optimize for power and performance. And since this driver is "in-box", there's no need to download.

Virtualization:

AMD provided code to Microsoft and worked with the Hypervisor teams to help ensure that Hyper-V R2 and Windows Virtual PC in Windows 7 utilize Rapid Virtualization Indexing (aka nested paging tables) for improved performance of VM guests. All of the third-generation AMD Opteron processors, AMD Phenom processors, and AMD Phenom II processors support Rapid Virtualization Indexing. In addition, most of AMD's shipping processors (other than AMD Sempron processors) include AMD-V technology and thus support Windows XP Mode for Windows 7.

Stability & Performance:

Current and upcoming reference platforms containing multi-core processors from AMD were loaned to Microsoft's labs to vet out potential incompatibilities with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

Graphics:

AMD has been working hard to support DirectX® 11, so there are plans to make native DirectX 11 hardware from AMD in its ATI Radeon GPUs available when Windows 7 is released.

GPU Compute:

DirectX 11 Compute Shader (CS) is a new API in Windows 7 that helps enable rich applications through the use of compute on the GPU (General Purpose GPU or GPGPU). Rich experiences such as drag-and-drop media transcoding, physics, and AI are a few areas that DirectX 11 CS can help enable.

• AMD's Windows 7 Connections