Arch rivals Intel and AMD are being bullish about their new multi-core processors. AMD with its 12-core Opteron 6000 series and Intel, with its 6-core Xeon 7500 processor series, are looking to give a fillip to a server market, which is still reeling from the effects of the recession.

With analysts expecting tech spending to increase in 2010, some experts feel the launches of the Xeon and Opteron could not have come at a better time. So can these new processors live up to expectations?

Even service providers are looking at it in the same way – ‘More processors = more performance per server = less need to maintain a high number of physical servers = cost savings’ is how they view it.

Considering that virtualization and consolidation are definitely  top priorities on most CIOs’ lists for this year, Intel and AMD seem to have played their cards at the right time. However, a possible concern could be around applications which are licensed as per-core, as opposed to per-CPU licensing. An increase in the number of cores will lead to a substantial increase in licensing costs of these applications, in effect negating the benefits from the performance improvements of these processors.

Another thing to be kept in mind is that consolidation and higher output per saver could lead to an increase in power usage, which will further balances out any efficiency gained. To avoid this, Singh advises that business evaluate the specific power v/s workload metric for particular user scenarios in the real-world to ensure that an upgrade to these processors will actually suit their requirements.

So, now if you have decided to upgrade to servers running these new multi-core processors, the next question should be – which one to choose? Asking the same question to NetMagic, we were told that the company would make a decision on the basis of price v/s performance and there were no preferences since they servers running AMD as well as Intel processors and were happy with both.

Price! – this is where AMD has an edge over Intel. Even if we forget that AMD has managed to pack 12 cores into the Opteron, twice the number that the Xeon boasts of, the Opteron family of processors are much cheaper as compared to the Xeon. This will surely have an effect on buying decisions and maybe make AMD’s Opteron more attractive to users. However this strategy has not really helped AMD much in the past, it still lags behind Intel in market share despite coming out with cheaper and arguably better products, but maybe in the present conditions this could just turn out to be a vital factor.

Meanwhile, hardware and software vendors like Citrix, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP, VMware, Cisco, Cray, Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, NEC, Oracle, etc. are expected to support  Intel’s XEON 7500-based platforms. AMD has not released the list of partners, though a day after the launch, it announced that Acer would be making enterprise servers using the Opteron 6000 series.

The stage has been set with enterprises going to define the demand for multi-core processors as their benefits make for an overwhelming buy. With a long, well recorded history of legal disputes between Intel and AMD, are we looking at a new chapter in the “Core Wars”?

Following an expensive acquisition (Sun Microsystems) and battling both IBM and SAP in the markets, Oracle still managed to post an impressive profit of $1.19 billion, or 23 cents per share, for the quarter ended February 28.

SAP’s most recent quarter was the best quarter of their year, only down 15%, while Oracle’s application sales were up 21%. But SAP is well ahead of them in the number of CEOs for this year, announcing their third and fourth, while they had only one.

Not entirely surprising, Oracle’s quarterly profit did slip by 11 percent as a result of its digestion of the $7.4 billion deal to bring Sun into its ranks. But according to Oracle’s Chief Financial Officer Jeff Epstein, the acquisition also added $458 million in revenue to the company’s bottom line.

They claim that the Sun integration is going even better than they expected.

IBM, Canonical and Simmtronics have announced that the Simmtronics netbook, the Simmbook, will be available to emerging markets at a low price of $190 USD (Approx Rs. 8600). Apart from India, the Simmbook will also be available in South Africa, Thailand and Vietnam.

The Simmbook comes preloaded with IBM Client for Smart Work, which includes IBM Lotus Symphony, access to IBM LotusLive cloud collaboration services, and choice of adding other IBM Lotus collaboration software like Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime.

Designed specifically for mobile computing, the Simmbook provides the power of a full-sized laptop in a compact body. IBM Client for Smart Work is IBM and Canonical’s complete desktop package that’s open, easy to use, and offers a security-rich alternative to costly, proprietary PC software, such as Microsoft Windows.  It can help lower costs by up to 50 percent of a typical Microsoft PC.

Simmtronics and IBM plan to continue to work with clients to offer the Simmbook at a competitive price to other countries around the world.

Obopay, a mobile banking and payment provider, was recently chosen by MIT’s Technology Review as one of the top 50 innovative companies in the world across sectors such as energy, computing, the Web, biomedicine, and materials. Obopay was conferred this honor under ‘Private Web Company’ category for bringing innovation in mobile payment services through its pioneering mobile payment service which is ubiquitous and highly secure.

With technology developed at its Bangalore based R&D centre, Obopay products are platform agnostic and global in nature. Other companies in ‘the Web’ category included names like Google, Twitter, IBM, Adobe amongst others.

The companies on MIT’s Technology Review list have been assessed on basis of their business model, deployment strategies, scalability of technologies as well as success rate. The editors of Technology Review analyzed companies over the last year that has demonstrated their superiority at inventing technology and using it for business growth as well as for transforming the lives of people. The companies identified were the ones with most promising technologies, whether they were giant corporations or fledgling startups with initial venture capital investments.

IBM, the National Institute of Design (NID) of India and Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST) at the University of Tokyo, have announced a new collaborative research initiative. This initiative is to explore an open, common user interface platform for mobile devices, to make them easier to use for the elderly, and illiterate or semi-illiterate populations in developing countries. The new research partnership is part of the IBM’s Open Collaborative Research (OCR) program, an initiative to foster innovation through university-industry research collaboration.

Mobile phones have had phenomenal penetration globally. Low cost of ownership and a simple user interface contribute to the success of mobile phones with the less literate. However, apart from basic voice communication, illiterate populations are not able to exploit the benefits of information and services available to Internet users. IBM Research – India and NID will identify the communication needs and preferences of the non- and semi-literate population; to not only help them connect but to engage with information through mobile devices.

Some of IBM’s Power7 machines have been shipping for several weeks, and the high-end Power 770 and 780 boxes start shipping this coming week.

The sales will depend on what gear you have installed, how old it is, who made it, and what applications it runs. IBM is trying to get out in front of a whole lot of upcoming server iron to show some good numbers.

Business partners make their own pitches to their customers, but they take their cues from IBM. And even before the Power Systems division was created from the merger of the formerly independent System i and System p divisions, IBM is keen on dividing and conquering the server market and bringing as many workloads as it can to the Power7 lineup.

First and foremost, IBM wants to remind everyone that it has dominant Unix market share (in terms of revenues) and that compared to its $5bn in sales, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle (now that it has assumed control of Sun Microsystems) have a combined $8bn in sales, split evenly between the two. IBM was able to make $600m in sales (presumably including software and services as well as hardware) last year on HP and Sun takeouts, and it wants to accelerate these. If a Power Systems migration is not in the cards, IBM is perfectly happy to bolster its share of the $30bn X64 server space by moving HP-UX and Solaris workloads to Linux on X64 iron.

There is also some migration to Windows going on here and there. IBM also wants to go into HP, Dell, and Fujitsu shops using X64 iron and consolidate multiple workloads onto Power-based servers. This is a familiar plan, and one that IBM’s AS/400 faithful have seen since PC-based server cards were first slapped into AS/400s back in the early 1990s and that was augmented as logical partitioning debuted back in the late 1990s on the AS/400.

IBM wants to “minimize leakage” from Power Systems to X64 boxes, and it doesn’t have any arrows that would show Power or X64 workloads moving to HP or Oracle Unix iron. And there are hundreds of millions of dollars in consolidation at stake there too. Interestingly, there is nothing in this chart that mentions i/OS specifically and that says there is a goal to accelerate migrations from X64 iron to Power-i/OS combinations or to minimize leakage of i/OS workloads to X64 iron. But there should be, and hopefully, there is even though the presenters briefing business partners did not get into the i/OS strategy.