Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook veep of technical operations, said salespeople from Chipzilla and AMD will promise the known world, but when the chips are down, the new technology doesn't do anything wonderful.

I met with Margaret Lewis, she is director of commercial solutions and software at Advanced Micro Devices. She spends a lot of time talking with data center managers about their needs and the transition to cloud computing.

Gartner doesn't provide details on server sales by operating system, as IDC does, in its public documents (you have to pay if you want to see that), but it does break it down into X64, RISC/Itanium Unix, and Other. Gartner believes that X64 server shipments fell by 23.9 percent to 1.65 million machines, and revenues declined by 27.1 percent to $5.45 billion. On the RISC/Itanium Unix front, shipments were down by 31.3 percent to 64,510 units, but revenues only dropped by 20.4 percent to $2.95 billion. Other machines accounted for a tiny 7,343 units, down 26.1 percent compared to the first quarter of 2008, but revenues were only down 19.3 percent to $1.76 billion. Mainframes are in this Other category, and maybe IBM's Power Systems i boxes are. Maybe not. Gartner doesn't say.

There has been no breakdown of Intel versus AMD yet. Apple has still only sold 12 netserves.

Late last month, the swine flu team from the universities of Illinois and Utah asked UT's Texas Advanced Computing Center for special access to Ranger. They wanted to be able to use part of Ranger on an almost continuous basis over several weeks to make rapid progress, using computer models, simulating how the swine flu virus would interact with various anti-flu drugs.

Researchers were trying to find ways that drugs could still be used against the virus, even after it mutates and becomes more drug-resistant. That lays the groundwork for designing new drugs that will be harder for the virus to resist.

It could be, of course, that the timing of the Nehalem EX launch had more to do with when ADM was expected to get its six-core "Instanbul" Opteron into the field. When Intel roadmaps indicated that would be at the end of the year, which was certainly the case back in February when Intel was showing off its roadmaps, it was no big deal. The current quad-core and hex-core "Dunnington" Xeon 7400s can compete, more or less, with AMD's current quad-core "Shanghai" Opterons. But with AMD saying three weeks ago that it was pulling its Istanbul six-shooter Opteron forward with shipments to OEMs for revenue happening in May and server partners expected to make announcements in June, it is possible - and maybe even likely - that Intel will try to get both the Nehalem EX and Tukwila chips into the field as soon as possible.