With all the vigour and exactness of stock market analysts explaining a one-point shift in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, pundits are penning obits for AMD in the aftermath of Sun Microsystems' recent decision to buy chips from Intel. Poor AMD: first Core microarchitecture, the looming doom of quad-core Core, and now the defection of its sole first-tier monogamous mate. Talk about your slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Let me ask you: If your wildest dreams were realized, how many cores per CPU would you have in your servers, workstations and power desktops right now? How much Level 2 cache memory would you have in each core, or would you rather it be shared amongst the cores? Would you rather have memory controllers for each pair of cores that access a set-aside block of memory, or one memory controller that sees the entire address space?
AMD has its hands in a lot of technology areas, and I track and report on all of them. I'm a huge fan of AMD's Athlon FX and X2 client CPUs, Turion notebook CPUs, and Geode ultra-low power technology. But I know the AMD you care most about is the one that will turn your entire server room into a one-rack, one-man operation.
An industry consortium says Intel's beleaguered chip offers choices, but will that be enough to win it market share?
By now, we should be enjoying a true commodity market in which the pricing trends of x86 CPUs track those of other PC components and semiconductors. Today, we're celebrating the $US500 PC, even though economic forces should have that price closer to $200. With chip manufacturing capacity and yields being as high as they are, all but the most advanced x86 processors should be readily affordable. They should be as cheap as light bulbs. Well, designer store light bulbs.
By now, we should be enjoying a true commodity market in which the pricing trends of x86 CPUs track those of other PC components and semiconductors. Today, we're celebrating the $US500 PC, even though economic forces should have that price closer to $200. With chip manufacturing capacity and yields being as high as they are, all but the most advanced x86 processors should be readily affordable. They should be as cheap as light bulbs. Well, designer store light bulbs.
A growing number of volume systems on the market today are incorporating the new 64-bit architectures from AMD and Intel. When you buy new hardware, you're part of the 64-bit revolution almost by default. But you still have a choice to make: Should you flip on those extra 32 bits by running 64-bit versions of your operating systems and applications?
Serial-attached SCSI, serial ATA and the storage reseller community are all going to be great friends.
A month or so back, I wrote a piece -- "Does the OS matter anymore" -- positing in essence that the generic nature of key applications is such that the underlying OS matters less and less all the time.
Face it: You're addicted and you can't quit.
The formation of an organised body to look after the interests of this country's large whitebox industry has been mooted for many years now without ever looking in too much danger of getting off the ground.
It was only a matter of time before Advanced Micro Devices filed an antitrust lawsuit against Intel, alleging that its nemesis for years has engaged in anticompetitive practices that bullied hardware vendors into shunning AMD's processors. Dare to use AMD processors, and you'll pay dearly by losing those sweet pricing deals.
While the battle for processor dominance heats up between Intel and AMD, product vendors are readying desktop and server offerings in the hope that customers will see the benefits of investing in dual-core technology.
Were it not for AMD's reinvention of the x86 system, I wouldn't be surprised to find that most IT buyers have the location of Dell's "go to checkout" button programmed into their fingers. The lack of a need to do a gear-grinding platform shift, much less a retroactive rip and replace, is the core attraction of x86 systems. At its heart, a 32-bit Xeon is surprisingly comparable to a one-chip Pentium Pro.
Ever since I began paying taxes, April just hasn't been much fun. Everything comes due in April, making May a month dedicated to grumbling and reactionary belt-tightening. Seems Redmond feels similarly, because so far Microsoft hasn't made many waves this merry month.
Until two years ago, Intel looked unassailable.
The Intel reorganisation earlier this month gives us an interesting peek into the future of computing -- a future that could become a double-edged sword for corporate and home PC buyers.
It is time ultra-thin notebooks made their mark in the mainstream market. It’s time we starting extolling the virtues of light notebook computing to all and sundry and as part of this grand scheme, I am writing this on the bus on the way home.
