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VIA Technologies aims to ship as many as 5.5 million CPUs this year, up 50% from about 3.6 million last year, said Steven Lee, special assistant to VIA president Chen Wen-chi, yesterday following the company’s announcements of a new foundry partner, IBM, and the merger of its Platform Support Division (VPSD) and CPU divisions.

VIA currently has three CPU lines, all based on the company’s Nehemiah processor core and produced at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). The C3 line is for desktop PCs, the Antaur for notebooks and the Eden for embedded solutions. By the second half of this year, VIA will add the new Esther processor core to its CPU lines. Esther is now being developed at IBM’s 12-inch East Fishkill, New York fab using 90nm SOI CMOS, low-k dielectric manufacturing technology, as reported yesterday.

The VPSD and CPU divisions are now being operated under a new VIA Embedded Platform Division (VEPD), responsible for CPU sales along with embedded motherboard solutions. Lee heads the new division. In chipsets, VIA aims to ship 40 million to 45 million units this year, compared with 31 million to 33 million last year, one high-level executive said.

News source: DigiTimes

Sybase's benchmark tests indicate that its Adaptive Server running on the G5 Xserve can provide faster data throughput and lower per-transaction costs compared to Windows servers, Salas said. The Dublin, Calif.-based company has yet to release its final benchmark test results.

These ASE features and the G5 performance improvements will encourage large enterprises to seriously consider Apple servers for important transaction processing applications, Salas said. "I have seen [that] this is already starting to happen," he said.

Sybase ASE 12.5.1 is available now with prices starting at $1,495.

The improved transaction-processing capabilities of Panther Server were essential to make a Mac server a more attractive platform for data-intensive applications such as document management, said Jim Small, president of MindWrap Inc., a developer of document management applications based in Flint Hill, Va.

MindWrap develops its products for multiple platforms. But the availability of Sybase Adaptive Server running on the Mac platform will be an attractive option for companies that are implementing major new document-management systems, especially in small- and medium-sized businesses, Small predicted.

With the Mac's historic focus on the content-creation market, MindWrap products were offered to earlier versions of the Mac OS. But the addition of asynchronous I/O support was really essential before enterprises would consider the Macintosh for applications that require heavy data throughput, Small noted.

The release of the G5 Xserve, coupled with a highly-scalable database such as Sybase Adaptive Server, will lend greater credibility to the Macintosh platform in corporate applications, said Jean Bozeman, enterprise server analyst with International Data Corp. in Mountain View, Calif.

Apple is going to see if it can "get more traction in the high-performance computing space beyond its traditional constituency of companies that have always had a whole lot of Macs," Bozman said.

For example, Apple led off its G5 server announcements at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco Tuesday with a presentation on a supercomputer application based on 1,100 clustered Power Macintosh G5 machines developed by the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blackburg, Va.

University officials said the group spent a little more than $5 million to produce a supercomputer that runs at 10.28 teraflops, making it the third fastest supercomputer in the world. The two faster supercomputers cost between $250 million and $350 million to build.

In the past, Apple has "been a little cautious talking about this in terms of how far they can expand from their traditional customer base," Bozman said. Perhaps that attitude has changed. She said that Apple would be more aggressive in promoting the G5 Xserve's potential for high-performance database applications.