Intel Talks Up X64, Itanium Roadmaps Ahead of IDF
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It's a few weeks before the Intel Developer Forum will capture a lot of the headlines in the IT trade press, but the company decided yesterday that it just can't want to talk about its future processors and their roadmaps. Especially with rival Advanced Micro Devices still not shipping bug-free quad-core Opterons and Athlons, other rival Sun Microsystems talking about its 'Rock' chips slipping a year into 2009, and final rival IBM doing a ramp of its dual-core Power6 chips in slow motion, Intel can rub it in a little. READ MORE >

Red Hat Releases Enterprise Linux 5.2 Beta
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last week, commercial Linux distributor Red Hat put out a beta version of its forthcoming Enterprise Linux 5.2 operating system, which will sport a number of scalability and performance enhancements for the X64, Power, Itanium, and mainframe platforms that RHEL 5.X supports. The company provided the traditional warning that RHEL 5.2 is only beta code and therefore it is not suitable for production environments, no matter how tempting new features might be, and said further that the beta test would run through May 7. READ MORE >

HP Goes Big Iron with Eight-Socket Opteron Box
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Neither Hewlett-Packard nor its better half in the X86 and X64 server racket, Compaq, were strangers to high-end machines that spanned more than four processor sockets--even X86 designs, not just RISC or Itanium designs. But for whatever reason, HP and many other server makers have not pursued eight-socket or larger server designs, with IBM and Sun Microsystems being notable exceptions in recent years. But with virtualization driving the need for bigger boxes with more cores and larger main memories--and more profits--you can expect more big X64 boxes. READ MORE >

As I See It: Bringing the Funny
by Victor Rozek

One of the early traumas that children suffer is often at the hands of well-meaning parents who hire clowns to entertain at birthday parties. The grotesquely painted face, the loud unfamiliar costume, the over-sized feet, and the parental pressure to have fun because this is costing Daddy a couple-hundred bucks all combine to confuse and frighten the child. More than one party has been disrupted when the birthday celebrant runs off crying in search of his or her mother. READ MORE >