Bang for the Buck: Big Iron Boxes, Even Bigger Bucks
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the past few months, I have examined the price/performance of baby, small, midrange, and enterprise System i5 servers against their competition in the Windows, Linux, and Unix counterparts. But there are bigger boxes still, the so-called big iron machines, which are the largest single-system image servers that any vendor puts into the field. While the System i5 machines do poorly compared to their peers at the low end when it comes to value for dollar, on the biggest boxes, the System i5 can be competitive. READ MORE >

Shearer Talks Up the Strengths of the System i
by Dan Burger and Alex Woodie

Mark Shearer has been general manager of the i5/OS and OS/400 platform through two name changes and four COMMON events, which makes him one of the longest-running GMs in recent times. He is the face of the System i for thousands of organizations and millions of users. Shearer sat down with IT Jungle at the COMMON conference in Miami to give us an update on how the System i is doing, and where it is going. READ MORE >

Chip Makers Embrace Co-Processors, Again
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If chip makers could put enough transistors on a chip, you could bet that by now they would have hard coded operating systems, middleware, and applications onto their circuits. Perhaps someday we will see such a feat, but in the meantime, the current crop of chip makers are looking to move beyond the familiar central processors with their cache hierarchies and memory and I/O buses to do what might be called asymmetric processing. READ MORE >

COMMON is Fun Again
by Brian Kelly

Over the last ten years, I have written a number of articles about COMMON and how the board of directors has siphoned out the fun and has actually made it prohibitively expensive for the fun-loving programmer analyst or other attendee to have a pleasant experience without using personal funds. But COMMON is getting better, in my opinion. And here's why. READ MORE >