The IT view of CeBIT 2008

Final words: AMD Shanghai rumors

We heard through the grapevine that AMD's Shanghai has already been benchmarked by a few OEM related people. Those people were very pleased with its performance; the improved IPC and 6 MB L3-cache are probably paying off. Despite the very bad and late start, there was quite a bit of enthusiasm for AMD's Barcelona CPU. Supermicro's and Tyan's fastest blade servers are based on the latest AMD chip for example. The AMD Barcelona seems to have stolen a bit of the quad-socket market share of the Intel Tigerton CPU, which was a lot harder to spot at CeBIT.

The Intel 5100 chipset + Xeon 54xx (Harpertown) combination looks to be another clear winner. Almost every vendor showed a whole range of products based on this low power, high performance combination.

Does anyone remember the XGI Volari? Once touted as an alternative to the midrange of ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards, the XGI Z7 and Z9 are quite popular as low power graphic chips in MSI, Tyan, ASUS, and other servers.