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An anonymous reader writes "After IBM reported disappointing Q1 earnings in March, to nobody's surprise, layoffs (RAs or 'Resource Actions' in IBM parlance) were announced two months later; June 12 seemed to be when most of the pink slips were handed out. While this is hardly a novel occurrence at IBM, this time the RA'd employee water cooler page is now open for everyone's inspection, and Cringely let loose with some predictable I-told-you-so's about financially oriented IBM senior management. Dan Burger at IT Jungle has a more numbers-oriented take on the latest round of layoffs."

BBCWatcher writes "In CPU news, IBM says that its POWER7 servers will start shipping in the first half of 2010, on schedule or perhaps even a few months early if you believe Wikipedia. Moreover, upgrades from a wide variety of POWER6 models will be mere CPU swaps, with the upgraded servers keeping their same serial numbers. (Bean counters like that.) POWER7 sports up to 8 cores per die, 4 threads per core, a clock speed a Hertz or two above 4 GHz, 45 nm process manufacturing, on-chip DDR3, and up to 1,000 micropartitions per machine. IBM claims that POWER7 will offer about 256 Gflops per die and two to three times the performance per watt as POWER6. IBM wants to keep taking orders now for its POWER6 gear (duh), so its sales reps are allegedly ready and eager to deal on 6-cum-7 packages. And it looks like that cunning plan could work rather well given Sun's Rock CPU cancellation and HP's delay of Tukwila Itanium to 2010. (Is anybody still in the server CPU race except IBM, Intel, and maybe AMD?) In 2006, POWER7 won the contest for a DARPA supercomputing R&D grant of $244 million, so you could say that each US citizen is in for about a dollar already."

Sun is continuing to tweak its "Galaxy" line of Sun Fire Opteron-based servers to they can support the new "Santa Rosa" Rev F Opteron processors from AMD . "The initial Galaxy boxes from fall 2005 were based on the Rev E iteration of the Opteron chips, which come in a 940-pin package. The Rev Es have an integrated DDR1 main memory controller on the chip. The Rev F chips come in a 1207-pin package that has a completely different processor socket and, because they also support DDR2 main memory, they also have a different main memory controller on the chip. What this means is that even though the cores in the Rev E and Rev F processors are essentially the same--the other big change is that the Rev F chips support the hardware-assisted virtualization feature code-named "Pacifica" and now known as AMD-V--the server boards that Sun created for the Galaxy line have to be changed to make use of the new Rev F processors. AMD has also created a modified 940-pin variant of the Rev F Opteron chips called the AM2 socket for entry servers and workstations."

delirium of disorder writes "Despite their recent focus on Opteron-based servers, Sun has not given up on SPARC. Niagara , the latest development in the SPARC line, will have 8 cores and according to this article will consume about 56 watts and have performance comparable to a four-way SMP Xeon system. New Xeons will consume hundreds of watts per processor."