Intel 4GHz Pentium chips no longer scheduled for 2004

Intel has admitted that it will miss its year-end target for Pentium 4 processors to hit the 4GHz mark. It now appears that early 2005 is the date for this desktop clocking milestone. The announcement is further bad news for the chip giant in what has been a rather rocky (although still profitable) year. ...more

The year 2003 in processor form

Its been a big year for processors and, interestingly, in areas outside the traditional desktop space. The year began with Centrino, Intel's ground up redesign of mobile processing and finished with Athlon64, AMD's number crunching, x86-based, 64-bit processor. And both Intel and AMD debuted new 64-bit server offerings - the Opteron from AMD, and the second-gen Intel Itanium. ...more

IBM breathes life into autonomic computing

IBM has unveiled details of software that can automatically manage spikes in processing end-user demand. The new initiative comes under the umbrella of 'autonomic computing', which is where a computer system manages its own operation - often referred to as self-healing software. The three technologies, in sequence, are 'Adaptive Forecasting', 'On-line Capacity Planning' and 'Rapid Reconfiguration'. ...more

Physicists deploy worldwide computing grid

The European Particle Physics Laboratory, better known as CERN and birthplace of the World Wide Web, has launched it first computing grid, giving physicists access to the processing power of computers in 12 countries spread across three continents. Grids are seen by many as the natural successor to the Internet; CERN believes that, 'they should eventually have as big an impact on society as the Web did, by allowing users to access worldwide distributed computing resources from their desktops as easily as local resources.' CERN is by no means the first organisation to set-up a grid. ...more

SOAP speeds binary data across the Net

The body that governs Internet standards is bidding to speed the transmission of large amounts of binary data over the Net. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has released three W3C Recommendations to improve SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)-based Web services. These involve the inclusion of binary data along with XML documents (XML-binary Optimized Packaging, XOP), improved addressing for SOAP messages (Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism, MTOM) and the ability to access cached copies of external data (Resource Representation SOAP Header Block functionality, RRSHB). ...more