The X Factor: High-End Chips Draw Even, Vendors Prepare to Differentiate
August 7, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It has taken a long time, a lot of planning and roadmaps, and some coincidental delays in products and surprises in the performance delivered by chip makers, but the four major high-end processors used in big servers–the IBM Power, Sun Microsystems‘ UltraSparc, the Intel Itanium, and the AMD Opteron–have more or less drawn even in terms of the high performance and dual-core capabilities that five years ago were only available from IBM. But the situation may not last for long, as these same chip makers are preparing to push their chips in different technological directions in the coming years |