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Description
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Hoping to build some confidence in its processor roadmaps, Advanced Micro Devices this week is talking more specifically about its Opteron and Athlon X64 processor plans between now and 2010. With the difficulties of the 'Barcelona' quad-core Rev F Opterons for two-socket and larger machines behind it and the 'Budapest' quad-core variants for single-socket boxes coming this quarter, AMD has taken a hard look at its roadmaps and made some important changes--changes that should improve its chances of keeping pace with a resurgent Intel.
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It may be anywhere from one to two months late coming to market, depending on how generous you want to be, but Sun Microsystems has delivered a usable distribution of OpenSolaris, the open source and development edition of the Solaris 10 Unix platform. But don't be confused. Sun also thinks that for those bleeding-edge companies who need all the latest-greatest features that have not yet been added to a patch for the commercial-grade Solaris, OpenSolaris is appropriate for production, too.
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The deck chairs are changing once again at the good ship Big Blue, and this time, not only are the top brass moving into new roles at the company, but some heavy hitters at IBM are trading in their office chairs for Adirondack chairs at their vacation hangouts as they retire from the company. It is hard to get any bluer than Bill Zeitler and Nick Donofrio, but a new team of managers is now being given a chance to try now that these two are retiring from the company in the wake of their impending 60th birthdays.
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In these times of tight credit, cash is without a doubt king. Or at least a knight, considering how inflation is affecting the cost of the consumables we all buy to live. Nothing demonstrates the power of cash more than the contrast between Rocket Software's failed $69 million attempt to acquire host connectivity and application modernization software maker NetManage, which was launched in December 2007 and withdrawn in March because Rocket Software could not raise the capital it needed, and an a $73.3 million all-cash deal announced today by COBOL and application modernization tool maker Micro Focus International.
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Late last week, after we had put The Unix Guardian to bed and then moved on to coverage of other platforms, Sun Microsystems announced that it has rolled out an update of its Solaris 10 Unix for Sparc and X64 platforms. The update, which is known as Solaris 10 5/08 even though it is coming out in April, comes out about seven months after the prior 8/07 update, which actually hit in September 2007, not August. (Go figure.) Anyway, the 5/08 update has some important features that Solaris shops have wanted for some time.
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A little more than a month ago, Sun Microsystems announced that David Yen, who was in charge of its Sparc processor development efforts off and on for many years, was leaving the company to take a job at Juniper Networks. Sun announced this week that it has tapped Mike Splain, a heavy hitter in the chip world who was given the interim job in addition to his duties as chief technology officer for Sun's Systems Group.
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Competition is a very tough thing, particularly when vendors get pinched by each other and a tightening economy at the same time. But so it is in the market for X64 microprocessors sold by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. While both companies are under pressure, dominant chip maker Intel is still making profits and ramping up acceptable quad-core products, while AMD is just now getting quad-core chips out the door and facing a resurgent Intel as it slashes 10 percent of its workforce to balance its books.
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That good ole annuity-style revenue stream, which accounts for a little more than half of IBM's sales in any given quarter, was gurgling and burbling along in the first quarter of 2008, helping to float the company's product sales and delivering pretty hefty overall revenue and profit increases considering the shaky nature of the economy in the United States. And lucky for Big Blue, three-quarters of its revenues come from outside the United States, which means the weak dollar amplifies overseas sales when they are brought back to IBM HQ.
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At a customer event that IBM hosted in San Francisco on Tuesday, the company finished fleshing out the big missing piece in its recently unified Power6-based server family: the Power 595. Like the Power5 and Power5+ System p 595 and System i 595 machines that precede it, the Power 595 server scales up to 64 processor cores and thanks to denser memory and a redesigned backplane and interconnect, can scale up to 4 TB of main memory in a single system image.
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As part of its rollout of the 'Vibrancy' tweak of its HP-UX 11i v3 operating system for PA-RISC and Itanium servers, known publicly as Update 2, Hewlett-Packard this week is repackaging its HP-UX operating system in four new editions that the company says better fits the way that customers consume its soft wares on its hardware. The delivery of Update 2 is significant because it came right on time, unlike the much-delayed initial HP-UX 11i v3 release.
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