x86 - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Mission critical ICT in the era of digital and diverse platforms

  Deane Johns of the NZ Association of Credit Unions and Steve Thompson of Unisys talk about how emerging technologies can be applied to this new environment.

• New HP servers

  Hewlett-Packard has introduced a line of x86 servers for organisations that operate large computing facilities, where cutting a few dollars off each system's energy or shipping costs can add up to significant savings.

• Shanghai chip gets AMD back into x86 battle

  There's a good deal that's special about AMD's new Shanghai server CPU. It's fabulous science, and fun for those of us who get dewy-eyed over the prospect of a 25% faster world switch time and immersion lithography. It makes the x86 battle interesting again because it carries AMD into territory that it must fight hard to win — the two-socket (2P) server space — and where innovation is sorely needed. AMD beat Intel's next-generation Nehalem server architecture to market while closing performance, price and power-efficiency gaps between Core 2 and Shanghai. Just as it did in the old days, AMD now claims that its best outruns Intel's best despite having a lower clock speed.

• IBM System i hangs on in NZ e-govt

  A plan to replace IBM’s System i server as the platform for e-government has been put on ice — for now.

• Parallelism: where the x86 hits the wall

  Your desktop computer is fast. It’s faster than you can type, faster than you can browse, and unlike you, it can do many things at once. Sure, you multitask. You can be on a conference call with your boss while you’re buffing your nails, but when you’re asked a hard question, what happens? You stop buffing your nails until you come up with the answer. Humans are not wired for parallel execution.

• Sun, Intel announce server pact

  Sun Microsystems has announced an alliance with Intel, a move that will greatly expand Sun’s involvement with the chip maker and continue its slow and long embrace of the x86 world.

• SIMD — the closeted genius of the x86

  The outlandish requirements of gaming and media applications have not only changed the way PCs are configured they have also driven an expansion of the x86 instruction set and on-chip registers that practically creates a CPU within a CPU (or a core within a core).

• Sun pitches big x86 server for virtualisation projects

  This week Sun Microsystems plans to announce new x86-based server products, including one that can support up to eight dual-core chips. In doing so, Sun is betting that IT managers will increasingly move to large systems as part of a consolidation and virtualisation strategy.