Monday, October 2, 2000		Latest in IT world

The wait is finally over. Pentium IV is likely to make its debut next month. After AMD’s launch of Athlon processors, the market has been keenly waiting for the launch of Intel’s next range of processors to take on the AMD and recoup it lost market share. As of now the fastest chip is from the AMD’s stable and has gained inroads into traditional Intel’s market of personal computers world over. However with the launch of Pentium IV, Intel — who is still the market leader — will consolidate its market further. The Pentium IV, would initially come out at 1.4 GHz and 1.5 GHz, and will consolidate the base of company's product line for next several years. This chip is expected to be launched first for the desktops, and then for servers, workstations and notebooks, with subsequent generations of processors. Pentium IV, which was formerly code-named Willamette, would be based on an entirely new architecture.

Microsoft’s latest offering in the Internet browser’s – Internet Explorer 5.5 has come once again into the focus after the discovery of yet another security hole in it, which could potentially give hackers an access to a user’s personal files. Under this bug, the hacker may gain access to a person’s personal files and records, by breaking into the cookies, which could reveal information about a person by using the Microsoft’s ActiveX technology, which is responsible for sending and receiving files. This way there can be potential risk for the Web surfers as the hackers can possibly pick up files from surfer’s computer and send it to arbitrary servers. Though, no causalities have been reported so far due to this new security hole, but the security analysts have taken a serious note of it. It is worth mentioning here that a similar security hole was detected in the Internet explorer only a few weeks ago, which also caused a lot of concern among the Web surfers.

Sun Microsystems, the leader in high-end UNIX server segment, has announced the launch of its new computers based on UltraSparc III chip. These models have been named as Sun Fire and Sun Blade. The two new computers Sun Fire 280R server, code-named "Grover," and the Sun Blade 1000 workstation, code-named "Excalibur," are relatively low-end systems, which can accommodate up to two of the new CPUs. These products will not be available for sale for the customers right now, and will be available only after a few months. Only Sun fire system will be available until January, which will include the Sun’s T3 Purple storage server. However, the other high-end models including StarCat, which is a successor to the current E10000 model, are expected next year. StarCat would accommodate upto 105 CPUs in a number-crunching configuration and 74 CPUs in a configuration for large businesses. Moreover since these systems will be using the coherent memory architecture technology, which will enable it to join four such systems to act as a single computer sharing the same memory and operating system.