Intel Cranks Up Xeon Clocks, Caches
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Several weeks ago, when Intel announced its 64-bit extensions to the Xeon family of processors, the company said that it had delivered a boosted Xeon DP processor and two more variations on the "Presontia" theme. These announcements got lost in the shuffle, so Intel spoke about these processors yesterday as it delivered a new "Gallatin" Xeon MP processor for high-end servers with a larger 4 MB L3 cache memory and a 3 GHz clock speed. These are the engines behind the Linux and Windows server markets. READ MORE >

Gartner Says Server Revenue Up in 2003
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While it's been known for weeks that server shipments climbed steadily in 2003, what was not so obvious was whether the actual money that those server sales generated would grow in the last quarter of 2003 and throughout the full year. As it turns out, at least as far as Gartner analysts can figure, there actually was revenue growth last year. This, perhaps more than any other factor in the IT market, is reason for a small amount (no irrational exuberance, please) of optimism. READ MORE >

Cray Buys Opteron-Linux HPC Upstart OctigaBay for $115 Million
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Cray announced last week that it would pony up just under $15 million in cash and another $100 million in stock to acquire a little-known but impressive maker of high performance computing (HPC) systems called OctigaBay. That upstart, which was founded two years ago, which has just started talking publicly about its Opteron-based departmental and divisional supercomputers, is in the finishing stages of development of the eponymous OctigaBay 12K systems. READ MORE >

IBM Explains Merged Systems and Technology Groups
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM last week came clean on the fact that it has indeed merged the Enterprise Systems Group and the Technology Group, and hopes that the merger of the units gives it synergies and efficiencies that were not always possible when they operated separately. The Enterprise Systems Group develops and markets its four server lines and storage devices, and Technology Group has a big custom chip business and had a big disk drive business before IBM sold it to rival Hitachi last year. READ MORE >

As I See It: Jobs and Jehovah
by Victor Rozek

Hewlett-Packard's CEO, Carly Fiorina, made a provocative statement a while back. "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore," she said. It was a telling, if somewhat flippant, remark that sought to vindicate the practice of outsourcing, while dismissing opposition to it for not being divinely sanctioned. As a measure of how far we've slid down the outsourcing job drain, Ms. Fiorina apparently could see no benefit in preserving middle class jobs. READ MORE >

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