Elmer, TechWeb article about IDF:
"Whereas IDF has been predominantly about desktop content, 50 percent [of] this year's [presentations] will be server content," said Mike Fister, vice-president and general manager of the Enterprise Platforms Group within Intel. "That's indicative of both the status of servers and e-business within Intel."
Can't happen soon enough for me. When a big part of your business stagnates or starts to look commodity-like, it's time to move up. Desktops are looking that way, although they're certainly not going to go away. Look out Sun Micro.
Companies will demonstrate the Infiniband I/O silicon in action, sources said, and ServerWorks Inc. should begin talking about 2- and 4-way chipsets for Foster, the forthcoming server processor based upon the Pentium 4's NetBurst bus.
It'll be interesting to see Infiniband grow up, how long it takes, etc. ServerWorks/Broadcom...might be the best purchase Broadcom ever makes.
According to Fister, Intel will "imminently" announce a 900-MHz Pentium III Xeon with 2 Mbytes of on-chip cache, and confirm that Foster will launch during the second quarter.
Good time for a refresh of all the 4-ways and 8-ways running on 500 or 550 or 700 MHz big cache Xeons now.
Sounds like a good conference for Intel to make a lot of headway for the new products, particularly in servers. Also, it's a good time to start beating the drum for Infiniband.
Tony |
