Intel's Nehalems to Star at IDF, AMD Pitches Shanghai
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The ongoing saga of Intel and Advanced Micro Devices goes on this week, as Intel will be hosting its semi-annual Developer Forum in San Francisco and will, among many other things, be showing off its impending 'Nehalem' upgrade to the current 'Penryn' family of Core processors. The Nehalem chips, slated for later this year, will be Intel's first true quad-core processor and will sport a new processor socket an interconnection mechanism called QuickPath Interconnect. READ MORE >

Sundry Red Hat Announcements: Fedora 10 Alpha, RHEL Support Extended
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat has made a bunch of relatively minor but yet important announcements in the recent weeks while The Linux Beacon was on hiatus for summer holiday. These include the first alpha release of the Fedora 10 'Camdridge' development version of Red Hat's Linux, extended full support for RHEL, and IPv6 certification for RHEL 5.2 by the U.S. Department of Defense. READ MORE >

Power Systems Memory Prices Slashed to Promote Virtualization
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While server makers are, generally speaking, pretty excited about server virtualization, their excitement is not just limited to the idea that the advent of sophisticated virtualization hypervisors and the efficiencies that consolidation affords compels customers to spend money on new gear when they might otherwise not spend anything at all. Server virtualization and the consolidation it allows also compels customers to buy beefier machines, ones with lots of processor, memory, and disk capacity, and I/O bandwidth. These are machines that are inherently more profitable than the little boxes sprawled all over the data center these days. READ MORE >

As I See It: God Bless Technology
by Victor Rozek

Technology is a canvas painted in broad strokes. It tends to be discussed as an abstraction, serving as a one-word synopsis for the diverse exertions of scientists and engineers. Technology is a verb without a definitive object. It has become an end in itself, many steps removed from the lives of end users. READ MORE >