The leading quote from this week's news comes from Intel CEO Paul Otellini: "We're doing product refreshes every two years, which is the model we invented and then stopped doing after Pentium 4, shame on us," Otellini said. "We fell off it -- mea culpa, we screwed up -- and now we're back on that pace."
Pleas to improve datacenter power-efficiency tend to be vague: Consolidate to fewer and more efficient systems; use virtualization to allocate resources based on need; and choose microprocessors, infrastructure components, and system architectures that are built with power conservation as a key objective.
AMD's next-generation processor line, code-named Torrenza, has gone from a block diagram to living, breathing silicon. The first incarnation of AMD's redesigned x86 CPU is Barcelona, that which your non-co-readers will call quad-core Opteron. Barcelona is genius, a genuinely new CPU that frees itself entirely of the millstone of the Pentium legacy. It'll do the same for you.
The start of 2007 finds IT vendors at the top of the food chain squirming at being treated like the help. Vendor royalty such as Microsoft, Dell, and Intel, along with consultants who have insinuated themselves as IT's empowered insider, don't like it when you hold strategy meetings without inviting them. Besides, it seemed clear to them that continuing to play up to IT's appetite for convenience, expediency, and avoiding risk was a solid basis for their long-term road maps.
SCO group is going down. Microsoft, Sun, and the greedy investors that abetted SCO in its campaign to loot Unix and Linux vendors and their customers have abandoned ship. Microsoft's public endorsement of SCO's legal action against, effectively, Microsoft's enterprise competitors and their customers, gave SCO the leverage to mug said vendors' customers for license fees when vendors refused to drop their wallets in court. Sun and Microsoft animated SCO as the prototypical litigious IP boogeyman in order to terrorize competitors' customers into switching to Windows or Solaris to avoid being hauled to court. That's how I laid it out in 2003, and I stand by it now.
Microsoft has intentionally rendered unsafe all but one path to heterogeneity, that being the use of Novell's SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise Server) in networks with Windows. By immunizing Novell against future intellectual property actions, Microsoft tacitly notified other players in commercialized open source that Microsoft sets the rules for Windows interoperability from now on.
When I have to declare, as I do this week, that everything I write in my column and blogs is my personal opinion, you know I'm on the warpath.
It's a pity that discussions on the subject of security vulnerabilities associated with virtual servers tend to focus on Windows: If a virtual machine is running as a guest on a Windows host, an exploit on the guest VM can climb up to the Windows host, and then all hell can break loose. There's more to securing virtual servers than not running VMs as guests of a Windows host. If cyberfelons gain local or remote access to a VMware Virtual Center console, your world is their oyster. This seems like a fairly obscure potential risk -- Virtual Center is pretty easy to lock down -- but are there other risks unique to virtual servers?
Virtualization is designed to render differences between systems irrelevant, but this is a good-news/bad-news arrangement. The good news is that IT can treat every server as an x86, with all x86 systems being standard. The bad news relates to the new difficulties we face in diagnosing and treating serious, but nonfatal illness when virtualization covers the source of the problem.
The green computing movement has gotten some traction; I'm glad. That was one of my earliest campaigns, a cause I fought before I had a voice. And until a few years ago, I was frustrated that others were overlooking the obvious: Corporations don't need to become champions of the environment to push for cooler, quieter, more efficient electrical equipment. I've said that they just have to look at their monthly electric bill. That was naive; how can a business tell what portion of its electric bill goes to computing and storage? There must be a way to figure out whether there really is a cost savings.
Apple gave up on Xserve G5, its 1U rack server, more than a year ago, and with it, its drive to gain share in the enterprise server market. Apple doesn't talk about what doesn't work or why, but I speculate that Apple's enterprise program took so long to get off the ground that by the time success was within reach, the market had moved on.
Intel's legal staff might as well buy homes in Delaware. That's the venue for AMD's anti-trust action against Intel, and this month, Transmeta petitioned the same Delaware Federal District Court to find that Intel has violated 10 of Transmeta's patents. The killer patent of the group is the one granted Transmeta in August. It relates to adaptive power control, which, you may be aware, Intel claims to have mastered in Core microarchitecture.
If you were counting on Leopard gaining an advantage from shipping before Vista, it looks like you're out of luck. Vista is in its last test release before shipment, and historically, the final release candidate becomes the supported RTM (ready to market) product. OEMs and volume licensees are expecting November delivery of the finished Vista, and the onesie twosie, shrink-wrap buyers will see Vista early next year. Subscribers to MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network, Microsoft's counterpart to the paid flavor of Apple Developer Connection) will probably get the RTM code sometime between those two dates.
The outlandish requirements of gaming and media applications have not only changed the way PCs are configured, it has 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).
Like it or not, buyers of x86 servers, clients, and workstations face a major platform shift as the 32-bit CPUs, operating systems, and applications slowly fade into history. That historic migration will have dramatic impact. After all, 64-bit computing revolutionized RISC-based UNIX systems, allowing them to step into roles dominated by mainframes and minicomputers. Something similar is sure to occur with PC servers as they muscle up with the huge horsepower and memory elbow room inherent in 64-bit computing.