AMD touts Bulldozer to lead

During the AMD analyst day, Pat Patla, general manager of the company's server and embedded division, said he expected the company's new 'Bulldozer' core to be the biggest change in x86 servers in a decade, reports PC Mag.

Patla began by talking about the current Opteron chips, which he said were the first eight- and 12-core x86 processors, and the first server processors to use less than six watts per server.

He showed a list of platforms shipping from Acer, HP, Dell, and IBM, acknowledging it took the company longer than it wanted to get the platforms shipped. When Bulldozer comes out, he said, all these systems will be compatible, as they can be upgraded with just a BIOS upgrade. He said he knew most customers don't upgrade, but said they like the flexibility.

Chip maker Marvell, which acquired the Xscale ARM RISC chip business from Intel in 2006, is now officially gunning for the chip giant in the market for low-powered, cloudy infrastructure servers. If there is such a market, states Channel Register.

At the ARM Techcon 2010 in Intel's hometown of Santa Clara, California, Marvell unveiled its quad-core Armada XP processor, which it claims offers up to five times the performance per watt as an equivalent (but unspecified) server chip from Intel.

The Armada XP chip is based on the ARM v7 MP core created by Marvell, which is a licensee of ARM Holding's various Cortex ARM processor designs.

Red Hat has revealed the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, setting the scene for its server operating systems for the next decade, notes Katonda.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 defines new standards for commercial open source operating environments, the company says.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux says it delivers superior uptime to Microsoft, and your ability to install patches faster than for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 reduces downtime, freeing time for more strategic IT tasks.