February 09, 2010

The unveiling of IBM (NYSE:IBM)'s new POWER7 and Intel (NSDQ:INTC)'s new Itanium 9300 processors on Monday come at a time when demand for traditional Unix servers, which are based on such processors, is gradually declining.

They also come at a time when the third most important Unix processor line, Sun Microsystems (NSDQ:JAVA)' SPARC, is in a state of flux thanks to the acquisition of Sun by Oracle (NSDQ:ORCL).

Together, these are starting to impact the channel, which is seeing fewer Unix server sales but more consolidation of applications. IBM on Monday unveiled its POWER7 processors which feature eight cores running up to 32 threads, or congruent computational tasks, per chip.

The POWER7 also includes new memory optimization capabilities, the ability to allocate the on-chip cache to four cores while turning the other four off to cut power consumption, and expanded virtualization scalability. IBM also introduced a number of new POWER7-based servers.

Intel on Monday unveiled its Itanium 9300 processor, code-named Tukwila, which features four cores running up to eight threads per chip. Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) is by far the largest user of Itanium processors, which form the core of its Superdome servers, which run the HP-UX Unix operating system. HP became heavily invested in the Itanium platform after it abandoned development of its own PA-RISC processor technology in 2001.

Other server vendors working with Itanium in Unix, Linux and Windows environments include Fujitsu, GroupeBull, Hitachi, NEC, SGI,Unisys (NYSE: UIS) and Supermicro. The future of the Solaris Unix operating system environment has changed with the closing of Oracle's acquisition of Sun. Oracle promised to continue development of Solaris and the ex-Sun SPARC server line, but going forward will optimize the products specifically for increasing the performance of Oracle applications.

Changes to the Unix server processors come at a time of a slow decline in the number of Unix servers sold. IDC in December reported that, in the third quarter of 2009, Unix server revenue dropped 23.4 percent compared to the same period in 2008. It totaled $2.8 billion in the quarter, accounting for 26.9 percent of quarterly server spending.

Source:-http://www.delawareonline.com/