| One view of enterprise computing is of a landscape of robust 64-bit computing products
including IBM’s POWER-based eServer pSeries and iSeries servers, Sun’s UltraSPARC
solutions, and HP’s PA-RISC and Alpha products, as well as the recent addition of Intel
Itanium-based solutions from multiple vendors. The development of these 64-bit solutions
followed an evolution similar to the previous jump from 16- to 32-bit processors and
applications, with all vendors seeking benefits from the doubling of address space, as well
as enhancements of integer operations and expansion of addressable RAM. But even the
most familiar sights tend to change over time. During the past two years, enterprise IT has
experienced tectonic shifts, some expected and others driven by the unexpected success of
hybrid technologies such as AMD’s Opteron processor. Consequentially, the most truly
disruptive enterprise IT trends are occurring not in high-end solutions, where significant
evolution is considered a matter of course, but rather in the low and middle ground,
sparked by processors that can natively support mixed 32- and 64-bit computing processes.
|
0 items
