Whitebox: Features

In 1973, Pete Townshend and The Who wrote and sang about Quadrophenia. And although it took another 34 years for quad-core servers to be counted as a commercial success, by all accounts, multicore server evolution is just beginning.

What a difference a year makes. One year ago, we were dazed, dazzled, and beguiled by the arrival of dual-core processors. Offerings from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices had analysts, journalists, IT professionals and enthusiasts all gushing with praise for a bright new multitasking future.

As the whitebox market fights for its life, local players are reinventing the wheel and dishing out a few survival tips. Strength in numbers is a main strategy.

It's a classic scenario. By building up a large team which works towards a common goal, the little guys are able to battle it out against larger, more powerful competitors - and make a statement while doing so.

Computer scientists at the University of Texas at Austin are inventing a radical microprocessor architecture, one that aims to solve some of the most vexing problems facing chip designers today. If successful, the Defense Department-funded effort could lead to processors of unprecedented performance and flexibility.

While smaller notebook price tags are great news for consumers, they are a big challenge for vendors and resellers alike. Several players in the market have now introduced models that break the $1000 barrier and the outbreak of a price war is a real possibility.

With dual-core technology promising double-digit performance increases with little or no rise in power consumption, resellers can pitch it as a key differentiator.

While many say there's still a role for the local whitebox player, morphing business strategies from a hardware player to a solution provider is a must in order to stay alive.

All the right components can make up a very good PC. But choosing the contents of your new machine can be tricky, because technology moves so quickly these days. We look at the components market, and asks the question: How do you beat remorse?

With slashed prices and squeezed margins, where can resellers look for some LCD action? Take advantage of revised vendor strategies and do some creative thinking: Analysts have highlighted the multimedia space is a good place to start.

For all the attention being heaped on Moore's Law this week, there's another more important law that chip makers must contend with as they push the limits of semiconductor technology ever further: the law of diminishing marginal returns.

The whitebox industry has traditionally touted efficiency, flexibility and speed to market as key differentiators from tier-one competitors. But with the likes of Dell and HP adopting whitebox strategies, such as targeting the SMB market, the industry is under pressure.

In the past decade, PCI has served as the dominant I/O architecture for PCs and servers, carrying data generated by microprocessors, network adapters, graphics cards and other subsystems to which it is connected. However, as the speed and capabilities of computing components increase, PCI's bandwidth limitations and the inefficiencies of its parallel architecture increasingly have become bottlenecks to system performance.

Consumers thinking about buying a new personal computer in 2005 might be better off putting off their purchase until 2006. With few major changes in PC hardware or software due over the next year, the PC of 2005 is likely to look awfully similar to the PC of today.

Trend Micro is in the process of consolidating its product support offerings in the wake of a consumer backlash.

Bringing the PC from the study into the lounge room is capturing the attention of large multinationals, large whitebox players and local mum and dad shops - and things are just getting started.

Rather than rest their fortunes on the favours of vendors, small-scale whitebox manufacturers around the country are carving out a niche with custom-built systems. And while they hardly rate a blip on analysts’ charts, many are building a healthy business based on upgrades, long warranties and excellent customer service.

You just gotta love a Cinderella story. Advanced Micro Devices is the hardscrabble kid who came to Silicon Valley with a dollar and a pack of Luckies and ended up in a building with its name on top. AMD's rapid rise from startup to US$5 billion semiconductor powerhouse is, as Humphrey Bogart's English teacher once said, the stuff of which dreams are made.

Perhaps the decision to name its flagship product after a fictional shipwrecked traveler who spent almost 30 years trapped on a small island was not the best of omens for Transmeta.

With the newest release of The SCO Group's UnixWare, it could be said that this variety of Unix is starting to look a lot more like Linux -- even if SCO lawyers pulled the Linux Kernel Personality modules from the operating system during the course of our testing last month.

With Government expenditure representing the lion's share of the IT economy, and locally produced goods at the top of their shopping list, marrying the two could prove profitable for whoever can crack the tender process.