I should start publishing this news, since my source seems faster and more reliable, though a little hard to understand. I get an email at least a few hours before the announcement that reads "Your new absolute-top-of-the-line-hardware has shipped. Tracking number YC23JK."<p>While I don't think it's technically illegal, I do find it strange that the manufacturers are allowed to collude to insure I personally overspend by at least 20% and never have top-of-the-line hardware for more than a month. I've come to accept that I'll never know how they picked me, but I'd still really like to know how they get my email passwords.<p>I think it'll work the other way too: A cheap way for hardware manufacturers to make their deadline is to ship me their current generation a couple weeks before they need to ship the next generation junk.
Neat, but wow look at the bus on that thing! Is Intel still using a basic crossbar for an interconnect? When are they going to roll out their new interconnect technologies? (They clearly must be working on them... they know just as well as the rest of us do that the on-chip network they have now isn't going to scale.)<p>These appear to be still built on the old 45nm process. It should be interesting to see what the 32nm westmere shrink look like. (The ones out so far are mostly only dual cores. They plan to do the rest of the line later in the year...)
The economics of virtualization certainly point to this being a hit. A 2U chassis with 64GB of RAM or so could easily replace half a rack of slower systems (add some flash drives to speed up IO if needed).
I don't have a use for a car, but a quad-socket machine may be pretty fun in terms of those "let the computer search for answers over the weekend" type problems.....