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 >

Linux and Windows Server Sales Outpace the Market in Q4
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Well, it is probably not a big surprise to anyone that revenues for servers running Linux or Windows outpaced the sales of the rest of the market in the final quarter of 2007. In fact, one way of looking at the market statistics just released by analysts at IDC is that Linux and Windows boxes are the main reason why the server market managed to grow revenues by 2.4 percent to $15.7 billion, driven by a 9 percent growth in shipments. READ MORE >

MetaRAM Quadruples DDR2 Memory Capacity in Servers
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

There are a lot of different ways to skin a system design, but the one that has been favored by processor and system designers alike for the past three decades is to boost the clock speed on the processor as high as possible, make each clock do more work, and add layers and layers of progressively faster main memory to the box to keep those faster processors fed. There are a number of problems with this approach, and they have caused a performance and capacity gap between central processors and memory subsystems that is still not being properly addressed. But a startup company called MetaRAM, which has just come out of stealth mode, thinks it has come up with an clever solution that will get CPUs and memory subsystems more in synch. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: Plane's Peeking
by Hesh Wiener

In computing, even the industry leaders can get hit with surprises coming from angles they never dreamed of. Sometimes these new ideas substantially change or extend the world of computing. These disruptive developments add new dimensions to information processing. And it's often very hard for the established leaders to understand what is emerging before their eyes. This is a situation much like the one at the heart of Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, a short, witty novel about mathematics and Victorian society written by Edwin A. Abbott, a theologian and scholar. Ballmer, Palmisano, and you ought to give it a quick read. READ MORE >