Stories about: Socket

In the late 90s I worked for a midsize ISP in the midwestern United States. Like any ISP at that time, we had dialup service, which meant we had a consumer-oriented tech support number. A friend of one of my co-workers was hired for dialup tech support. We'll call him Jake. He had some computer experience but no specific qualifications to do more than what he was hired to do.

The Wi-Fi Alliance celebrated the first anniversary of the 802.11n draft 2.0 certification last week, and said the faster Wi-Fi technology's "upward trajectory ... continues unabated."

Technology we take for granted today was new not so long ago, and somebody had to name it. Though sometimes it's hard to pin down exactly who deserves credit -- or blame -- here's a shot a some of the more familiar ones.

Taiwan's MSI (Micro-Star International) announced its competitor for the new low-cost laptop market, the MSI Wind, early this month at Computex, and we got a chance to try it out at MSI's offices in Taipei last week.

A technology that could help the environment by eliminating the need to ship a power adapter with every electronics device got a vote of confidence Friday from consumer electronics maker Westinghouse Digital Electronics.

Unisys is releasing several virtualization services and its first server based AMD processors, the company announced Wednesday.

IBM is releasing three new rack servers built on Advanced Micro Devices' quad-core processors, all aimed at users who need large memory systems.

The Victorian State Revenue Office (SRO) is conducting a mammoth 10-year Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) implementation to revitalise its central payment systems.

Sun has developed a 1U chassis design that can handle an impressive number of drives, yet also provide for a standard two-socket Intel-based mainboard and the company's signature four gigabit Ethernet interfaces, not to mention a relatively advanced Lights-Out Management coprocessor. The Intel-based Sun Fire X4150, AMD-based X4140, and SPARC-based T5120 and T5140 servers all look identical to the casual observer, but each offers a different take on the purpose of the ubiquitous 1U server.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini's memorable "shame on us... mea culpa, we screwed up" March 2007 speech to Morgan Stanley investors came after his company's marketing fog machine could no longer conceal the truth that, depending on your point of view, Intel was peddling technology that it knew to be somewhere between four and eight years behind AMD's. AMD told you so, and so did I, but Intel's marketing is capable of overpowering reason. Intel manages to thrive by setting expectations that match its technology, and raising those expectations every two years by just enough to make you see your Intel-based PC or server as wanting. Otellini got stuck apologizing because AMD got a chance to show buyers Opteron's potential. The market's expectations followed, as they naturally will when people buy technology that never needs replacing. Given the choice between buying well and buying often, the market chose the former.

There was a time when workstations occupied a highly competitive niche in the hardware market. In those days, some 10 years ago, companies such as Sun Microsystems, SGI, IBM, HP, and Dell competed fiercely to deliver the top desktop systems characterized by powerful graphics and processing engines. An added element to this competition was the vendors' reliance on vastly different processor architectures to deliver the knockout performance. A decade later, the market segment is significantly different.