disdain. Yes, it was their software that failed—but it might have been anyone’s code that blew up.

Look around your data center and your company. How many applications are there—operating systems, applications, servers, desktops—that perform license tests upon startup? If the license code is flawed, some day your software may not start. Worse: What if your software does a “phone home” upon startup? Most “phone home” license software can accommodate a failure to make a connection—but what if the vendor’s license validation server gives your software a thumb’s down? Do you have a contingency plan?

The Core of the Processor This is a challenging time to be at AMD, and a great time to be at Intel.

tive chairman. The new CEO, Dirk Meyer, had been president and COO, and has a background in microprocessor technology; he was also involved in the development of the Athlon processor. He’ll have an uphill battle: The company’s huge investment in graphics chips, with the purchase of ATI in 2006, hasn’t yet paid off, and Intel has stolen the momentum in high-end multi-core x86 processors.

Shortly after Meyer’s sudden ascension, AMD revised its processor roadmap, showing four-core technology through mid-2009. The six-core “Istanbul” processors are expected to appear in the second half of 2009, followed by the 12-core “Magny-Cours” chips in the first half 2010. It’s an aggressive plan. Too bad Intel got there first.

While AMD loses money,

During the summer, Intel introduced its six-core Xeon X7460 processors, scheduled to ship before the end of 2008. The company will also be pushing a new brand of quad-core processors, called Core i7, which could find their way into consumer desktop and high-end notebook PCs.

Intel also unveiled a new graphics-chip architecture, code-named “Larrabee,” also designed for the consumer market. According to Intel, “The first product based on Larrabee will target the personal computer graphics market and is expected in 2009 or 2010. Larrabee will be the industry’s first many-core x86 Intel architecture, meaning it will be based on an array of many processors. The individual processors are similar to the Intel processors that power the Internet

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Advanced Micro Devices is in shambles, following the release of its second quarter financial results. On July 19, the company revealed that it lost US$1.189 billion. It also revealed that its charismatic CEO, Hector Ruiz, was kicked upstairs to become execu-

Intel prints it by the bucketful. Its second-quarter numbers, also released in July, showed record quarterly revenue of $9.5 billion, with a $1.6 billion profit. With that much cash, Paul Otellini, president and CEO, can embark on aggressive plans.

and the laptops, PCs, and servers that access and network to it.”

The Larrabee graphics processors are based on the Pentium processor, and incorporate a wide vector processing engine, 64-bit extensions, and aggressive instruction/data prefetching.