This is something we've been working to fix in the community! The good news is that most of the development and testing so far has been on an N36L-based Microserver, where the experimental AMD KVM support seems to work pretty well. There's a github repo -- https://github.com/jclulow/illumos-kvm -- and hopefully I'll get time soon to respin a current SmartOS ISO with the AMD-enabled bits.
Please be sure to submit to HN when you have a new respin ready. Pretty sure there are a lot of potential new SmartOS users on here who'd like to use KVM with AMD. Got my eye on a N40L-based Microserver myself.
Great to see that SmartOS developers are active on HN.
I'm interested in SmartOS but I've heard some things about it not being production ready. What's your view?
Also, being able to boot from an internal volume (not USB) is also crucial to me, as the alternative is simply not an option. (The "best" case, using a USB drive, is not an option as our server is in a shared rack and you run a risk of someone unplugging it).