The Power 595 Takes the Top TPC-C Benchmark Ranking
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is a goal of all the makers of big iron boxes to push the performance envelope, and not just because vendors have big egos--oh, they certainly have those--but because their customers are always pushing them to push the performance envelope a little further. Sometimes, a lot further. For the past six years, the cold war in the big iron space has been especially intense between IBM, the Unix upstart and proprietary system leader, and Hewlett-Packard, the Unix stalwart and Windows and Linux upstart with a smattering of proprietary big iron. READ MORE >

AMD Offers Clock Cranks on Barcelona Opterons
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

OK, so last week, when I said that Advanced Micro Devices had finally finished getting its quad-core Rev F lineup of processors into the field with the delivery of the 'Budapest' Opteron 1300 series of chips for single-socket workstations and servers, you all knew I was talking about finished at the socket level, right? I certainly didn't want to give the impression that there would be no more clock speed bumps in the quad-core Opteron lineup. READ MORE >

Forget About Platforms, Let's Talk About Jobs
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As a long time watcher of the systems and server area--at least by IT journalism standards, where journos usually burn out after five to 10 years in the field--I take a keen interest in any means of ranking the different platforms of the world. In the absence of truly impartial data, I am always on the lookout for a new way to compare different platforms. For the past couple of weeks, I have been playing around with the Internet's major search engines to rank various server platform brands, and this week I continue the series, this time looking at what really matters to most of us: jobs. READ MORE >

As I See It: Citizen CEO
by Victor Rozek

Think of yourself as the CEO of your life. Your budget, like that of your competitors, is 8,760 hours per year. How do you vote with your time, money, and energy? What do you say 'yes' to, and what do you say 'no' to? Given all of your different personas (the goof-off, the responsible one, the dreamer, the provider, the visionary, the critic, the good child, etc.), which has controlling interest of the enterprise that is you? Who are the stockholders you are obliged to please? Who sits on your board of directors; and who has veto power? And, if you're not fully enjoying your work, whose dreams you are living? READ MORE >