HP Puts Solaris on More X64 Servers, Partners for Solaris Emulation
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It might seem like Hewlett-Packard can't decide to love or hate rival Sun Microsystems. This week, HP significantly broadened its certification for Sun's Solaris 10 operating system on its ProLiant rack and tower servers and BladeSystem blade servers. But on the other hand, HP has partnered with Transitive to jointly engage with Sun's customers to see how they might deploy that company's emulation technology. What HP loves, you see, is the money that some Sparc shops want to spend as they migrate to X64 iron. READ MORE >

Sun Details Server Chip Roadmaps at Analyst Summit
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sun Microsystems hosted its day-long analyst summit meeting in San Francisco this week, and the event was a lot less glum than it has been in prior years now that the company's new management is seeing some market traction and financial results on its hardware products and open source software strategies. There was not a lot of news at the meeting, but Sun did talk a little bit about roadmaps, and divulged the details of a future Sparc T1 processor that many suspected was in the works. READ MORE >

AMD Delivers Faster and Cooler Rev F Opteron Chips
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Advanced Micro Devices this week cranked the clock another notch on its dual-core Rev F Opteron processors, raising the top speed of the chips to 2.8 GHz. And because AMD is in a price and technology war with Intel, AMD is giving customers that extra 200 MHz of performance at the same price as it charged for its 2.6 GHz parts and cut prices across the line as it shifts its bins. READ MORE >

The X Factor: One Socket to Rule Them All
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Vendors in the information technology business talk about standards more than just about anything else, something that the advent of the open systems business and Unix taught them to do two decades ago. But from their point of view, standards are a terrible thing--unless you happen to own one. We have standards for operating system features--POSIX and TCP/IP being two big ones--and standards for networking--Ethernet of ever-increasing speed--for storage--PCI, PCI-X and now PCI-Express peripheral slots and SCSI, SATA, and SAS disks--and for main memory--FB-DIMM and DDR2 modules. And now, perhaps, is the time for a standard CPU socket and interconnection scheme. READ MORE >