I'm sure most of you are already sick of hearing about Tablet PCs, but one point struck me at Microsoft's launch of the new devices. Many of the PC makers had issued Tablet PCs as glitzy, titanium-cased devices, with commensurate prices. But Research Machines, with its focus on the education market, offered a cheaper product. And it opted for a tablet-only design - not a dual role laptop/tablet with a keyboard and a hinged screen.
Research Machines' approach may be popular. Raw data is the lifeblood of many business processes, and the Tablet PC may provide a convenient way to collect that data in machine-readable forms. A tablet design as cheap and cheerful as possible might appeal to firms.
At the other end of corporate computing, there are developments for high-end systems using Intel's new 64bit Itanium 2 processor. NEC's High Performance Computing Division has just introduced its TX7 family of multiprocessor systems based on Itanium 2.
Jorg Stadler, NEC's marketing manager for European Supercomputer Systems, says the TX7s are designed to be high-end, general-purpose systems. There are three models available, one with up to eight processors, one with up to 16, and one with up to 32. For high-performance computing the TX7 is sold with either Linux or HP-UX Unix operating systems.
Key to the design is the NEC-developed crossbar technology for high-speed communications between the processor cells, each with four Itanium 2 chips and 16GB of memory. The firm's close association with IBM - NEC makes mainframes that are plug-compatible with IBM systems - shows in the way that every subsystem is hot-swappable, and because partitioning is possible at the cell boundaries.
The TX7 is no slouch: the 32-way system is rated at 100 gigaflops - 100 billion floating point operations per second - which puts it high on the Top 500 Supercomputer list.
In hardware terms, Itanium 2 processors are now able to compete with the best that Sun or IBM have to offer. Many vendors are preparing to launch such Itanium 2 products. However, those vendors that also offer excellent system management tools are likely to attract corporate customers.
Identifying those vendors may require IT managers to keep an eye on the otherwise esoteric world of supercomputers, which is where the business servers of the future are emerging.
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