Test Center Daily | InfoWorld Staff » Test Center Tracker: Why more than four cores?

September 27, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Test Center Tracker: Why more than four cores?

TAGS: Test Center Tracker

Chip wars: The saga continues: InfoWorld Chief Technologist Tom Yager chips away at the marketing mantra behind Intel's Core Microarchitecture. "Not terribly long from now, AMD could find itself cornered into explaining to non-gearhead buyers why AMD64 stayed put at 8 cores and 3.8GHz when Intel announces sixteen core, five GHz Core Microarchitecture CPUs with 2.5GHz front-side buses," he writes. "I want to tell AMD to keep to the high road and trust that the commercial market will come around as it did with Opteron." Yager argues that Intel (and AMD), with their newest chips, both should have stuck with four cores "and focused on fat and fast busses that give those cores something to fill instead of something to wait for."

Demofall goodies: Roving Editor at Large Paul Krill checked in to Demofall '06 and discovered nice array of tantalizing technological tidbits. Among them: "Void Communications' VaporStream is a Web-based hosted message service that eliminates all traces of a message once it has been read; readers can't even print it out or do a screen capture." Other exhibits included RingCube's MojoPac technology, which transforms an iPod or other USB storage device into a portable PC.

Pay as you print? Over in his SMB IT blog, Oliver Rist contemplates a new business model offered by some print vendors, such as Xerox. "It's like an all-in-one car lease. You get the printer(s), all the consumables and all maintenance from the manufacturer for a set monthly fee based on the manufacturer's assessment of your printing volume." That can save your company on the high costs of consumables, perhaps. Worth checking out? Let Oliver know.

Posted by Ted Samson on September 27, 2006 06:00 AM

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