Intel kicked off its Itanium presentation today by saying the Itanium's system revenue since the introduction of 2001 has crossed the $5 billion mark. That outsells total sales of AMD's Opterons. And, according to IDC Itanium sales surpassed all of SPARC sales for the first time since the introduction of the Itanium. That was in 2001 and was the culmination of former CEO Andy Grove's dreams of a microprocessor that was truly mission critical.

But up in East Fishkill in New York State, architects and engineers continue to design future iterations of IBM's Power family. And today IBM has released new Power 7 CPUs that are in a different league to Intel's microprocessors.

It manages to achieve its low price point by using an AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 processor - a single core chip with 512KB of L2 cache, clocked at 1.6GHz. To complement this, there's 2GB of RAM and a Radeon HD 3200 graphics chip. Understandably, performance is a bit of a mixed bag and the X100e lies somewhere between a netbook and a CULV-based laptop.

You can buy one here for $510.

Mainstream servers in the future could have a combination of graphics processors and CPUs in servers as applications take advantage of thousands of GPU cores, said Gina Longoria, director of the product management and workstation division at AMD. The company may provide CPUs and GPUs together in a server to run highly parallel applications, she said.

In Nov. 2009, TACC announced that the Ranger supercomputer had run over one million jobs in under two years. Since it entered full production Feb. 4, 2008, Ranger has completed over 1,089,075 jobs and logged 754,873,713.8 hours of processing time, with an impressive 97 percent uptime. The system counts 2,863 users across 981 unique research projects.

In addition to the HD 5450 which was officially launched yesterday, AMD is preparing another card that should fill the gap between the HD 5450 and the HD 5670. The card in question is the HD 5570 which should be quite similar to the HD 5670, at least when you take a look at main specifications, but it will use lower clocks and cheaper memory.

Alleviates some of the intermittent grey screen and vertical line corruptions that may randomly appear during normal usage when using an ATI™ Radeon HD 5800 series graphics card

There are not a lot of details available at this point, but what we do know is that when single-thread performance is needed most, Thuban processors will automatically disable idle cores and overclock the remaining engines to the maximum possible level that is determined by general thermal design power. The technology will be completely hardware-based, hence, will work in any operating system that supports six-core chips. The technology is presently called “C-state performance boost”, however, it is more than likely that AMD will introduce a better sounding marketing name when it launches six-core chips in the second quarter of the year.