PC World Business

There's a good deal that's special about AMD's new Shanghai server CPU. It's fabulous science, fun for those of us who get dewy-eyed over the prospect of a 25 percent faster world switch time and immersion lithography. It makes the x86 battle interesting again because it carries AMD into territory that it must fight hard to win--the two-socket (2P) server space--and where innovation is sorely needed. AMD beat Intel's next-generation server architecture to market while closing performance, price, and power efficiency gaps between Core 2 and Shanghai. Just as it did in the old days, AMD now claims that its best outruns Intel's best despite having a lower clock speed.

Zoho has finally added a central document management page called Zoho Docs to tie together its many useful online apps. The clean-looking, functional page looks much like the Google Docs start page, with a folder view on the left and all files - spreadsheets, documents, presentations, etc. - listed on the right.

It's hardly news these days when RHEL or Suse Linux boots Windows or Unix off a server. And we know that commercial software vendors are paying plenty of attention to commercial open source.

Pity the poor road warrior who tried to find his data on The Linkup, only to get this message when he logged in: "Unfortunately The Linkup service is no longer available. Please visit box.net for your storage needs." What's worse, the sales guy was on an extended trip through North and South America. That's a real story, told by one Jacob Sherman, "I just want my data," he said.

The Microsoft home page caught my eye with an invitation to "Test Drive" Windows Vista. Now, I don't need to test it out; I've been working with it for the past two years. But I was curious about the quality of this online offer with a browser interface.

It seems that every decade or so I get the opportunity to write an article on IT deja vu. This time around, the topic is cloud computing, which is the latest IT buzz word.

Healthy debate is often necessary to get a balanced view of an emerging technology. Somewhere between endorsements and detractions, a realistic understanding of the long-term outlook for a technology arrives. As such, I have decided to turn to a guest once again for the second installment in what I hope to be an ongoing debate over the merits of flash SSDs (solid-state drives).

While using an AMD Barcelona (quad-core Opteron) server to create a portable benchmarking kit for InfoWorld's Test Center, I discovered something unexpected: I could incur variances in some benchmark tests ranging from 10 to 60 per cent through combined manipulation of the server's BIOS settings, BIOS version, compiler flags, and OS release.

Being an optimist, I like to think that storage management is or will be getting better. It's hard, however, to ignore the fact that many admins don't know much about what's going on in the storage boxes they are sitting on. And it's not their fault, as management has been the Cinderella of storage apps for many years, and she hasn't found a prince to rescue her quite yet.

It is a question that the channel would like to have an answer to.

Like the presidential seal that vanished without comment from a politician's press podium, the competitive marketing brickbat that Apple flung at BlackBerry -- that BlackBerry's push e-mail works only with Microsoft Exchange, as if Exchange were an onerous burden -- quietly vanished from Apple's campaign.