AMD Says Barcelona Bug Is Fixed, Almost Ready to Ramp
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The executives at microprocessor maker Advanced Micro Devices have had to endure their share of grief in the past nine months. First, after boasting that its native quad-core 'Barcelona' and 'Budapest' Rev F Opteron processors would best quasi quad-core alternatives from rival Intel, the Barcelona Opterons, used in two-socket and four-socket machines, were delayed beyond their expected June launch, and when they debuted in September they came out at slower speeds than many expected. And then, in December, AMD said the Barcelonas had a bug in their cache. READ MORE >

HPC Sales Account for Most of 2007's Server Sales Growth
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The appetite for high performance server clusters, vector supercomputers, and a few exotic hybrid machines continued to outpace the growth rate in the overall server space in 2007, according to market research just completed by IDC. The so-called HPC market, which most of us old hands still think of as supercomputers, has always been on the cutting edge of technology, but in recent years, it has been one of the key drivers of the server market as supercomputing has become more mainstream. READ MORE >

IBM Readies Big Power6 Boxes, New X64 Servers
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM may be mostly a services and software company, but most of the services and software it sells are still, despite all the changes in the IT industry in the past three decades, driven by its own server platforms and the operating systems that IBM creates for them. So in that regard, if you think of services as the extra goodies you used to get when you spent 10 or 100 times as much for a server than you do today and if you think of software as the stuff that used to come with the hardware more or less for free, than maybe Big Blue hasn't changed as much as the financial results might lead us all to believe. READ MORE >

Canonical Ships Landscape System Management Tool for Ubuntu
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

There seem to be as many ways to manage physical and virtual servers these days as there are brands of boxes, operating systems, and virtual machine hypervisors. And now, there is one more. Last week, Canonical, the commercial entity behind the Ubuntu variant of Debian Linux, announced a new system management tool for Ubuntu called Landscape. READ MORE >