Power consumption takes center stage at Forum

There's only three things you can count on in life: death, taxes and processor upgrades. Which is why it's important to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to the latest tech. To that end, the Microprocessor Forum, which kicks off today in San Jose, CA, would be a good place to start. Engineers from AMD, IBM, Fujitsu and Sun will present their respective road maps for the next year, outlining their new products for 2007. The theme of the event for this year seems to be power-efficiency, with all of the major chip vendors attempting to create processors that achieve performance gains without having to draw more power. Excitement is high for IMB's upcoming Power6 line of chips, which is expected to see a performance boost up to 5 Ghz while consuming the same amount of power as the Power5. "Doubling the performance without increasing the power envelope is pretty amazing news," said Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT Research. "It's not just more speed, but it allows people to do the kind of business they couldn't have done before."

Meanwhile, the quad-core battle is heating up, with AMD revealing a few details about its upcoming "Barcelona"--an answer to Intel's recently-announced quad-core line and the first truly "native" quad-core chip. It's pretty clear that all of the major chip makers are tuning in to the needs of enterprise users, as concerns like power consumption in the server room increasingly drive sales.

For more on the Microprocessor Forum:
- check out the article at eWeek