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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (147656)	11/13/2001 7:33:26 AM
From: t2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Intel is now on a roll. XP and lots of other announcements. december quarter surprise is a certainty, IMHO.

To: Road Walker who wrote (147656)	11/13/2001 9:53:36 AM
From: The Duke of URL©	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

November 13, 2001 As Alternative to Mainframes, IBM Plans Line of Servers Using Intel's Foster Chips By WILLIAM M. BULKELEY Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL International Business Machines Corp. plans next month to start selling a new line of powerful server computers using Intel Corp.'s Foster microprocessor, several months earlier than rivals will have the much-awaited new chip available in their machines. IBM, Armonk, N.Y., will be marketing its new servers, code-named Summit, as alternatives to mainframe computers, according to analysts and customers briefed on the computers. Analysts said it marks the first time that IBM has attempted to market Intel-based systems as major computers for corporate data centers, where they compete with IBM's own mainframes and Unix-based Regatta servers. Although IBM didn't rent a booth at the huge Comdex computer trade show in Las Vegas this week, IBM salespeople are providing extensive details on Summit in hotel suites there. Unisys Corp., Blue Bell, Pa., has been selling a mainframe based on Intel's Xeon chip for about a year, but other companies such as Compaq Computer Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., have held off, waiting for future, more powerful Intel chips. Intel's Foster is a 32-bit chip that the company expects to be about 50% faster than the current generation of Xeon chips. Intel has said it is shipping prototypes of Foster but said it doesn't plan to formally introduce the chip until the first half of next year. IBM is making "an aggressive attempt to push mainframe design into the Intel world," said Jonathan Eunice, an analyst with Illuminata, a market research firm in Nashua, N.H. He said IBM designed the system so that it will keep running even after some parts are unplugged. John V. Nelson, chief technology officer for Cap Gemini Ernst & Young LLC, a computer-services firm, says he plans to install Summit servers in all the company's development centers. "These are very, very important announcements" for customers who want to consolidate small Intel servers used for managing e-mail or printing, into a single larger system to save money and floor space, Mr. Nelson said. IBM is currently showing a small system code-named Crusader that uses four of Intel's Foster microprocessors, but next year it expects to bring out systems that scale up to 16 processors. IBM's xSeries, based on Intel's current generation of Pentium processors, can only scale up to eight processors, and most customers use four-processor models because of difficulties making the larger systems work efficiently, analysts say. People familiar with the situation said that IBM created what the industry calls a "chipset" to connect to the Foster processor, rather than waiting for a third party to introduce an industry-standard chipset. Vernon Turner, an analyst with International Data Corp., said that IBM's chipset works with the microprocessor so that the system is "balanced" with fast cache memory for temporary storage on the chip and enough bandwidth to use all the power of the Foster chips. At Unisys Corp., which has sold about 500 of its Intel-based ES7000 systems, Peter Samson, vice president of sales development, said "we think IBM will help develop a much larger market."

To: Road Walker who wrote (147656)	11/13/2001 12:11:55 PM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

John, There is an article in today's WSJ (I get the hard copy, if anyone can cut and paste from the on line edition that would be great), titled "IBM to Sell Servers Using Intel's Foster, Starting Next Month". I see that Duke posted the article. Couple of comments about it, around this part of the article: IBM is making "an aggressive attempt to push mainframe design into the Intel world," said Jonathan Eunice, an analyst with Illuminata, a market research firm in Nashua, N.H. He said IBM designed the system so that it will keep running even after some parts are unplugged. This is all about availability which is expressed as a measure of the percentage of time in a year a machine is available, or up and running. The term "nines" is used, where five nines means you're up 99.999% of the time. Machines like the no-down Compaq/Tandem ones get up to eight nines or something as essentially everything is redundant in them. Lower end Intel servers today, and Suns before they fixed their ECC problem, are down in the lower number of nines. Non-availability includes time the machine is down not only for repair, but also for upgrades or microcode patches which the server vendor recommends. So, the mainframe is most known for highest availability and IBM is making a statement by saying they're trying to take Intel based machines into that class. Some features that get you to five or better nines, besides just highly reliable chips, boards, software, etc., are hot pluggable or replaceable parts, maybe even including CPUs, and dynamic repartitioning to keep a machine running even if a failure occurs. This can even be unseen by the customer. Ability to power up and down separate portions of the machine to repair or upgrade without taking the whole machine down is another feature IBM is probably doing. Bottom line is it sounds like IBM is the first OEM to be placing features that only high end machines traditionally use, into Intel based machines, to elevate them up toward that high end class. Couldn't ask for a better one than IBM. They invented the term RAS and a lot of the features that go into it. Tony

To: Road Walker who wrote (147656)	11/13/2001 12:53:02 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

John - Here's an article on IBM's Summit Chip Set - which works with BOTH INTEL'S 32 bit servers and 64 bit ITanium servers. dailynews.yahoo.com Tuesday November 13 10:00 AM EST IBM takes high road with Summit chipset By Sandeep Junnarkar CNET News.com IBM is bringing to market a new family of servers based on its Summit chipset technology and on high-end Intel microprocessors. The systems will serve as a testing ground for Intel's 32-bit Xeon and 64-bit Itanium processors. Unlike most chipsets, Summit is ambidextrous: It will work with standard 32-bit chips as well as with the upcoming--and faster--McKinley processor. As previously reported, Summit allows IBM to incorporate features typically associated with its supercomputers and high-end server lines into generally less expensive Intel-based servers. Under the X Architecture initiative, IBM's more affordable server lines have gained features such as the ability to swap out memory and processors while the computer is running. Summit also is designed to permit corporations to put up to 16 processors in a single machine. The xSeries servers, for instance, consist of as many as four processor "quads," each of which can have four processors and features its own memory and input-output abilities. The quads can communicate over a high-speed "scalability port." The new family of servers will be available beginning next month, according to the Wall Street Journal. Email this story - View most popular \| Printer-friendly format