“In 2005, IBM plans to bring a significant feature from higher-end servers to the next generation of its PowerPC 970 processor line used in Apple Computer machines and Big Blue’s own blade servers,” Stephen Shankland reports for CNET News. “The next-generation chip will have technology that lets it run multiple operating systems simultaneously, said Karl Freund, vice president of IBM eServer pSeries. Doing so allows a computer to handle more jobs at the same time and to be used more efficiently.”
MacDailyNews Note: If that name sounds vaguely familiar, he’s no relation, that we know of, to Karl Freund, the “I Love Lucy” director of photography (among other things) who, along with Desi Arnaz, developed the 3-camera system of filming television shows that’s used to this day. Freund died in 1969.
“The technology, called partitioning, relies on a concept called virtualization that breaks the hard link between an operating system and the underlying hardware. Partitioning is available today only on servers using IBM’s higher-end Power4 and Power5 processors and in competing server designs from Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Intel,” Shankland reports. “Freund declined to comment on when in 2005 the chip is scheduled to arrive but said it’s “pretty late in the design cycle now.” Apple plans to use it, he added.”
More info in the full article here.