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Tid-bits
11/9 - The day after Microsoft released SQL Server 2005, Dell Canada announced new servers. Dell is not running away from any power issues surrounding Intel's current server chips. While it may be a mistake to say that Intel's current x86 server chips run hot, their power consumption is much more than the successors to these CPUs will be in about a year's time. Moreover AMD has taken Intel's own metric for evaluating CPUs—performance per watt—and has used this metric against Intel, claiming that AMD's Opteron has an advantage over Intel's Xeon. Nevertheless Dell asserts that the PowerEdge 6800 and 6850 balance "performance demands with power consumption".
Congratulations to Transmeta who recently announced their second profitable quarter in a row. Transmeta used to primarily make microprocessors that did in software that other CPU architectures do in hardware. As a result, Transmeta's processors consumed very little power, and the future looked very bright. However, Intel and AMD countered with their own power management technologies, and Transmeta's fortunes plummeted. Nevertheless you would think that power-saving technology would fit in well in today's environment with its emphasis on performance per watt, and in fact Transmeta is still doing processors. But they are also licensing their IP (intellectual property) and doing services as well. Microsoft and Sony are two of their customers. It appears that they needed to diversify in order to succeed. The president and CEO attributed their success to "our modified business model".
Intel will soon release a new processor for its notebooks codenamed Yonah. Yonah will be dual-core but not 64-bit. Dadi Perlmutter, who heads Intel's Mobility Group, stated that the decision to not incorporate Intel's 64-bit extensions in Yonah boiled down to a trade off between less power consumption and current demand for the technology. "When you put in more features, it costs you ... in power", he said.
Sony apparently has a contrarian streak. The trend today, as witnessed by the iPod, is to replace hard drives with flash memory. Sony is bucking that trend and releasing a hard drive in a Compact Flash Type II form factor for high end digital cameras. It would seem that the hard drive still does some functions better. The "write speed" of flash is slower.
Why upgrade to a CPU that supports virtualization technology when they become available? After all, one can still run virtual machines on CPUs that do not incorporate VT or Pacifica. One answer is that virtualization software, such as VMWare, Virtual PC, or Xen, "should see performance improvements when they upgrade to hardware with virtualization".
Symantec has a webcast on the fundamentals of Adware and Spyware, if you have an hour.