Continuing professional development plays an important role in assisting Compucon channel members to remain current and develop new competencies in information technology practices

4:30pm  System Platform & Roadmap Update (TN Chan)

3rd Party Hardware

We will briefly look at the latest development of the following:

o Adaptec SAS RAID controller
o LTO4 tape drive & Backup Exec Quick Start
o Solid State Disk
o SCSI phasing out
o ITX for Non PC

Server Virtualization

Both Intel and AMD have progressively introduced hardware features in the CPU to assist bare metal virtualization as against software based virtualization.  This session will focus on what AMD describes as the virtualization eco-system covering 4 steps so far.

o Direct Connect Architecture
o Integrated Memory Control
o Nested Paging
o I/O

CPU & Chipset

Intel has stirred up the industry by announcing X48 chipset when X38 is barely introduced.  The move is to bring in Quad Core processors with 1600MHz front side bus to compete with Phenom from AMD.  AMD has made big thunders last year about Barcelona and Phenom but has not really delivered so far.  Its latest effort was hit by a hardware bug and full release is expected to be not earlier than March.  Quad Core Barcelona is worth waiting for.  It has many performance merits over its Intel counterpart.  In this session, we will learn about a few performance features that most people are ignorant of such as SSE and Hyper Transport.

Compucon System Roadmap

Compucon is well known for management of system platforms in addition to the highest level of reliability and compatibility.  This session will cover the evolution of 3 models that have served our channel and customers very well for over 12 months (Yes, most vendors change motherboards every 3 or 4 months). This session will cover Diamond (Process PC Intel), Thunderbird (Knowledge PC AMD) and Workgroup Server (Intel).  We will learn about the gains of each step of evolution.

Download System Platform & Roadmap Update