Launching Pad

The IT world is an unpredictable place; things change quickly and rarely go exactly as planned. Even so, good business planning requires a road map--even if only a tentative one--of both your own capabilities and your partners' offerings. With that in mind, we're looking out to the horizon at some of the major product releases planned for the second half of this year, to give you a sense of what's around the next corner.

All of the products listed here have expected official release dates between July and December of 2007. Microsoft's Longhorn Server didn't make the cut, for example, because while undoubtedly a major release, it's not expected to be officially available to the public by the end of the year.

AMD AND INTEL:

'Barcelona' and 'Penryn'

While Intel is set to release four additions to its Core 2 Duo Processor line on July 22, it's the debut much later in the year of the product code-named Penryn that has specialized systems builders abuzz. Penryn, the successor to the Merom core now used for the chip giant's Core 2 Duo T5000/T7000 series mobile processors, will mark the debut of Intel's version of the 45-nanometer process, the latest milestone in semiconductor fabrication.

Intel has timed Penryn's release--sometime in "the latter half of the second half" of 2007--to ensure that motherboards and Intel's 3 Series chipsets are in place to support the new processors, according to Steve Dallman, general manager of Intel's Worldwide Reseller Channel Organization.

AMD's quad-core Opteron chip, code-named Barcelona, will ship toward the end of summer with full systems coming out shortly thereafter, says John Fruehe, AMD's worldwide market development manager for server/workstation products.

According to Fruehe, Barcelona would be easy to install after removing dual cores, and would offer a "significant level of performance improvements" over Intel's quad-core Xeon 5300 processor for servers.

Systems builders have mixed feelings about the new products from the two chip giants. The latest and greatest in microprocessors simply doesn't matter much to Cheap Guys Computers customers, says Glen Coffield, president of the Longwood, Fla.-based systems builder.

"One thing about the CPU business is that nobody cares. It's the bottom end of the stack. The customers don't care. There's a fringe element that cares," he says.

"We've had Athlon 64s for going on five years. And do we have a viable 64-bit OS yet? No. We need a true multithreaded 64-bit OS and we need applications. And Microsoft needs to stop screwing around with Google and get back to their core business and say, 'Hey, we've already got 64-bit applications' like their very popular flight simulator, and build that into their office products," he adds.

But for a manufacturer of high-performance systems like Boxx Technologies, which specializes in systems for visual effects artists and architectural design firms, the quad-core releases can be huge.

"The real area where multicore processors are excellent for us is in rendering. The more individual processing units you can throw at the problem the better," says Francois Wolf, director of marketing for the Austin, Texas-based company. "And for that, multicore processors are a panacea, [like] the El Dorado."

Next: IBM/Lotus: Notes 8; Domino 8