Apple Goes Quad Core in Xserves and Mac Pros
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Customers using servers and workstations from Apple Computer are finally getting a much-needed performance boost now that the company this week has launched its first machines supporting quad-core Xeon processors from Intel. As the maker of the sexiest Unix machines on the planet, Apple needs to get on the cutting edge of hardware and stay there if it wants to grow its market share for servers and workstations--something that it is perfectly capable of doing now that Apple is the darling of Wall Street and the hip gear in our hip pockets. READ MORE >

A New Year, A New IBM Systems and Technology Group
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM's desire to get a much larger share of IT sales to small and medium businesses (SMBs) and the company's heavy reliance on the financial sector for core software and system sales has compelled the company's top brass to reorganize its Systems and Technology Group. Bill Zeitler has managed IBM's server and systems unit for so long that no one can remember his predecessor--hint: there wasn't one--and last Thursday he told STG employees about the final phase of a year-long transformation that has been underway in the group. READ MORE >

Servers Get Their First Power and Performance Benchmark
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For the first 40 years of the systems and server market, price/performance was basically the only metric that mattered within a given class of machines. But in the 21st century, when power and cooling issues are thwarting the attempts of companies to continue adding computing capacity at the rates they did in years gone by, there will be a new metric that people will start to pay attention to: performance/watt. To that end, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation has just release its first benchmark that gauges the performance and power consumption of servers. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: Motherboarding
by Hesh Wiener

In 1995, IBM shifted its proprietary midrange systems from CISC to RISC processor technology. Today, the System i is to a considerable extent a variation of the System p--or visa versa, depending on how you want to look at it. Last year, IBM sent a processor guru out to talk about a chip called z6, a sibling of the new Power6 chip that executes mainframe instructions. IBM will soon announce z6 mainframes that share a lot more than just some processor technology with the System p. They could easily be more than 50 percent System p, by weight. READ MORE >