Computex is the biggest assembly of computer system designers, developers, makers and vendors in the world.  It is an industry trade show (not for consumers) held annually in Taipei and over 130,000 visitors attended the event that took place on 5 to 9 June 2007.  Without doubt, the 2 powers namely Intel and AMD did their best to showcase their latest and greatest.  What should school network administrators know about these latest offerings? How will these offerings affect computing in the school?  Intel has showcased the next generation of CPU with strange names like Harpertown and Wolfdale and AMD has come up with Barecelona and Phenom.  Intel has introduced a new series of chipset called the 3-series consisting of 7 members (X38, P35, G35, G33, G31, Q35 and Q33) and some will support quad core CPU with 1333MHz front side bus and DDR-3 1066 memory.  AMD has announced the 7-series chipsets for supporting Hyper Transport 3.0, PCI Express 2.0 and DirectX 10.  These latest announcements do not affect school computing immediately but their effect will start to flow through the school in about 3 months' time.  Which new technology to take on and which to ignore?  The simple guideline is FFP (Fitness for Purpose) and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).  The new technologies will mostly affect the high end machines in the school such as those used for multimedia authoring purposes as well as fileservers that are experiencing major progression in utilisation and scalability.  If you wish to better understand any of the above matters, please email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .