The IEEE hosted its International Solid-State Circuits Conference last week in San Francisco, which is generally loaded with coming out parties for all kinds of server processors. IBM‘s top techies from the Power Systems division were on hand to show off some more of the feeds and speeds of the forthcoming Power8 chips, expected sometime around the middle of this year.

Many of the feeds and speeds of the Power8 chip were divulged last year at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University, which The Four Hundred reported on at the time. Some more details of the Power8

This rumor, should it turn out to be true, will not come as much of a surprise to IBM i shops that read The Four Hundred. Time and time again, as I have watched IBM‘s quarterly financial results, I have wondered at what point the chip manufacturing business would be too expensive for Big Blue to stay in. We may be approaching that point.

Tongues have been wagging for a long time on this issue, particularly in the wake of IBM’s decision to sell of its System x X86 server business to Lenovo for $2.3 billion a few

Zend Technology is figuring out what IBM figured out a long time ago: that success is a double-edge sword. With an estimated 240 million Web applications powered by PHP and widespread adoption by the Fortune 500, it was just a matter of time before Zend relented to its customers and eased up on the oh-so-hurried three-year upgrade cycle. As of today, Zend is supporting the PHP language and its PHP runtime for a minimum of five years, with the possibility of longer support.

The shift from a three-year support policy to a five-year support policy for PHP and the Zend

The number of bitcoins in circulation is more than 12 million and growing. They have an aggregate value with an order or magnitude of $10 billion. Are bitcoins money? That depends in on how one defines money and where in the world one happens to be. In China, it is illegal for banks to trade bitcoins but in the USA bitcoins are kosher. Overstock.com sells IBM x servers for bitcoins. But there is no simple way to buy Power or mainframe servers from IBM with the bitcoins they resemble.

Bitcoins: While in practice a bitcoin is a data

Although the FlashSystem 840 from IBM is primarily a storage array for X86 and AIX systems, its application for IBM i shops is significant regardless of its somewhat subordinate conspicuousness. The first thing to think about is that the 840 is software that provides data management services in integrated environments. It optimizes database workloads and it becomes the tier one storage layer.

The second thing to think about is that this latest version (introduced in January and touted at PartnerWorld last week) has doubled the performance while reducing the price–about 10 percent–from the previous model, the 820. Flash technology for

IBM‘s continued effort and investment in nurturing Linux on Power Systems was on display last week at the annual gathering of IBM business partners known as PartnerWorld.

Access to Power Systems servers for business partners, primarily independent software providers (ISVs), has been revamped with improved tooling for Linux-oriented ISVs bringing that development arena up to par with what has existed for IBM i and AIX developers for some time. This particular partner program, which is now called the IBM Power Development Platform (PDP), was formerly known as the Virtual Loaner Program. It was established in 2003 to encourage ISV

The momentum behind the OpenPower Consortium that Big Blue started up last summer to breathe some new life into the Power chip continues to build, now that Samsung Electronics has joined up.

So let’s see. We have IBM as a Power8 chip maker and Suzhou PowerCore of China as one that is working on its own designs. We have Tyan as a motherboard maker, who presumably is working on motherboards or already has them done. Or, perhaps more comically, Tyan is already a contractor that is making motherboards for Power8 systems that IBM is planning to use. We have Mellanox

With a timely gain in fourth quarter software license revenue driven by new customers and a growing consulting services business, the financial scorecard for Manhattan Associates for its fourth quarter and total revenue for its fiscal year looked good with double-digit gains.

In the final quarter of 2013, revenue increased 13 percent to $107.6 million, while for the year revenue increased 10 percent to $414.5 million. Both figures set new records for the supply chain management company.

Manhattan Associates recorded software license revenue of $17.3 million in the fourth quarter, which topped the prior year’s period by 20 percent. New

Salary surveys are like train wrecks, you know from experience this could very well be ugly, but you can’t help but look anyway. This opportunity to survey the scene comes from the career trackers at Dice. If indicators of rising salaries and mounting confidence only make you feel miserable because of your employment situation, let this be your warning to look the other way.

Compensation is up, but salary satisfaction is not. And, with two-thirds of the survey respondents also confident they could grab a better job at a different company, it leads to the unanswered question: What will

After closing out 2013, IBM‘s new chief financial officer, Martin Schroeter, didn’t mince words. After hefty pre-tax losses in its Systems and Technology Group, the company would be rebalancing its workforce, which is an IBM euphemism for layoffs. So is resource action.

Schroeter said IBM would book $1 billion in charges in the first quarter to cover the layoffs, and that would be somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000 of its 434,000 global workforce, depending on which Wall Street analyst you ask. (Last year’s $1 billion in charges covered somewhere between 6,000 to 8,000 workers.) These numbers do not include