When getting directions with Bing, there will now be a “Navigate” button which starts the turn-by-turn voice navigation. The voice navigation feature was developed by the Microsoft Tellme team.

Phones initially compatible with the new free navigation service include: HTC Fuze, HTC Pure, HTC HD2, HTC Tilt 2, HTC Touch Diamond 2, HTC Touch HD, HTC Touch Pro, HTC Touch Pro 2, Motorola Q9c, Samsung Jack, Samsung Omnia II, Samsung Propel, and T-Mobile Dash 3G.

With competition in the Web browser field having transitioned from cold to boiling in less than a year’s time, Mozilla suddenly finds itself playing catch-up against not only Apple and Google, but Microsoft as well. In March, the organization realized it needed to completely make over Firefox 4 if it wanted to remain feature competitive against a fast-rising Google Chrome.

In a live presentation yesterday, Mozilla Firefox director Mike Beltzner admitted that his group’s March roadmap, which involved an interim release of Firefox 3.7, had too many steps. Now the group has decided to straighten out its path by grafting version 3.7’s main additions onto a point release Firefox 3.6.4, and shifting gears to focus on version 4.0.

“We were talking about shipping a Firefox 3.7 in the middle of the year, and shipping a Firefox 4 at the end of this year. Well, it turns out, the primary motivator for Firefox 3.7 was helping our users with frequent crashes caused by plug-ins,” Beltzner told a global audience yesterday. “We’ve managed to do that, and we plan on shipping it to our Firefox 3.6 users in Firefox 3.6.4…What was going to be Firefox 3.7 is now going to be Firefox 3.6.4.”

In Betanews’ research, a well-used installation of Firefox 3.6.3 has crashed an average of six times per day. Analysis of these crashes using Microsoft SysInternals tools indicates that, in at least three out of six of these cases per day, Adobe Flash appears to be the “catalyst,” to borrow a phrase, for Firefox’s downfall; in two cases per day, Adobe’s PDF Reader is the likely cause. The plug-in architecture originally planned for version 3.7, and now being implemented in the version 3.6.4 public beta, is designed to compartmentalize plug-ins on a per-tab basis. Our tests thus far have turned up initial evidence that Flash-related crashes have been contained by the 3.6.4 beta, although we’re skeptical about its ability to contain Reader crashes as well. However, we do not yet have complete statistics.

Beltzner’s plan does not actually accelerate the organization’s roadmap, but rather cuts out a handful of the steps required for it to reach its goal. It still wants Firefox 4 shipped by the end of this year, and to that end, Beltzner has set mid-October as a target zone for Release Candidate 1. The first betas of Firefox 4 could be ready by the end of June, which actually means — if history is any guide — that the first alpha releases of the product (usually intended for developer feedback only, though publicly available) would need to launch within weeks, at the latest.

“In the past, I think we haven’t gotten as focused around our beta rollout as I think we should have,” Beltzner conceded yesterday. “We’ve always aimed it at early adopters; early adopters for our betas have never been a problem. We actually have a very rich beta audience; we normally get to around three quarters of a million to a million users for our betas, which is fantastic…But they are primary early adopters. So we see ourselves getting surprised when we release a product, and mainstream users start using it in a different way.”

Mainstream user feedback was critical for Microsoft Office 2010, and an extended period for that feedback was necessary in order to enable bugs that early adopters would not have found to be discovered, and also for new feature suggestions to be culminated. Perhaps Mozilla discovered this as well, which is why it’s annexing more time for the Firefox 4 beta out of what used to be the 3.7 project.

“We need to make sure that our beta this time is focused both on early adopters and mainstream users, so we’re getting a good spread of data,” said Beltzner. From here, according to Beltzner’s roadmap as of yesterday, the final Firefox 3.6.4 should be released “about the middle of next month,” which translates on the calendar into next week. Mozilla has planned a 2010 Summit for the first week of July, and Beltzner wants the first Firefox 4 beta at least one week before then. The beta phase will be expanded to last over three months, with frequent public updates every two to three weeks. An API freeze is slated for mid-August, which is necessary for developers of plug-ins and other tools that interoperate with Firefox, to enable them to make their own plans. Then the UI freeze will take place in early September, so that documentation teams can take screen shots and expect them to be valid come October.

Beltzner needs differentiators that will help the new Firefox stand out solidly against Google Chrome, as well as a potentially resurgent Internet Explorer 9. He may have found some with respect to Firefox as a platform: With plug-ins already strong and with Web apps maturing into a self-sustaining industry, the browser can evolve to become more like a desktop. Chrome’s architecture now enables plug-ins of a sort, but Google’s penchant for minimalism at all costs makes each plug-in occupy a single icon in an address bar that quickly becomes crowded for space.

Firefox 4 will attempt to exploit that Chrome weakness by giving Web apps (ironically including Google Docs and Gmail) their own identity by way of its forthcoming “app-tabs” feature. There, online tasks can be elevated to permanent tabs in the tab bar, slimmed down to just icon size but still representing a common tool. This way CNET can be a bookmark, but Pandora can be a tool.

With Facebook becoming a “sharing center” on a scale few had predicted, and with Adobe and soon Microsoft deploying Web apps from the browser, it no longer makes sense for privacy and security policies to be relegated to “Internet zones” and “non-Internet zones” like in IE. Sensing that opportunity for differentiation, Firefox 4 will offer what Beltzner currently calls a Permissions Manager, where users set the sharing permissions that pertain to specific Web sites. As of now, it’s merely a concept, which means Mozilla developers will have to work fast, now, to get a working model for Firefox 4’s first alphas.

Determining that earliest part of the new roadmap will likely be the focus of the next developers’ planning meeting set for later today.

Responding to questions about how he foresees Firefox 4’s competitive stance against Chrome 5 and IE9, Mike Beltzner said, “We’ve built the Web ecosystem into the space that we’ve wanted it to be. [Compare] that to five or six years ago, with one player and no competition, nobody pushing each other forward. We’re now in a space that’s intensely competitive, and all of [us] pushing each other forward. We watch our competitors and our competitors watch us, and we are in it to win it…People who are working on Mozilla and believe in our mission should really feel that. It’s no longer the case where it’s all easy-win. There’s hard work to be done here. We have to dig our heels in, and we have to make sure that we are the ones who are leading the charge here and keeping the Web open for users.”

You may have noticed a change in Google online, the addition of a column on the left side that lets you narrow your results to just images, videos, blogs, shopping and other categories. That change has come to Google mobile as well, although it is concealed.

When you use Google on the iPhone or on an Android phone, you may notice two small arrows on a button to the left of the field where you type in your search terms. Touch that box and a column will appear.

The box lets you sort by type (videos, blogs and so forth), time period (24 hours to a year or custom dates), or just images. If you don’t want the menu on the left, touch the arrows again to remove it.

As simple as it is, it is a useful tool, once you know where to find it.

Google has added another tool as well, specifically for Android phones running systems 1.6 and higher. Google Goggles, the image recognition software, can recognize English, French, Italian, German and Spanish, and can translate those languages into several others as well.

To use it, point Google Goggles at the text you want to translate, draw a box around the words you want to translate and press the shutter button. If it recognizes the text, it will offer to translate it for you. Google said its eventual goal was to also translate non-Latin languages like Chinese, Hindi and Arabic.

Tracking the Outage

The OpenGraph Search API is a part of Facebook’s newly launched developer API, an interface to the social network which allows developers to access (with permission) users’ profiles, friends, status updates, etc. for use within Facebook applications and external services built on top of Facebook’s platform.

The search API in particular allows developers the ability to search all public objects available in the social graph, including posts, people, pages, events, groups and even an individual user’s New Feed as documented here on the Facebook developer site.

In Facebook’s provided example query, the search term used is “watermelon,” which may or may not be a very popular topic, so we used keywords that we were sure had been posted publicly somewhere, at some point, by at least one of Facebook’s 400 million users.

For instance, in a query for the word “graduation,” the most recent result result was a status update from 23:20 GMT (19:20 EST military time or 7:20 PM EST). The “updated_time” of that post was this morning, but that only refers to when a user comments on a post according to Facebook’s developer documentation.

In other words, around 7:20 PM EST last night, the OpenGraph API stopped pulling in new public status updates.

According to the developer who reported the issue, both his forum posting and bug report have, so far, been unanswered. We have also reached out to Facebook’s PR team and have yet to receive a response. (We will update this post if we do).

Facebook Outage Raises Questions

The larger issue here isn’t just that a portion of Facebook’s platform has gone down – numerous web services have issues from time to time, including everything from Gmail to Twitter. An outage of this length, however, with no official communication from the company itself is disturbing.

With Facebook’s new “Open Graph” initiative, the network has launched an incredibly ambitious plan to socialize the entire web by way of publisher plugins, APIs, “like” buttons, instantly personalized websites like Pandora and Yelp, “login with Facebook” boxes, live streams (like those found on CNN during live events) and more.

The social network is weaving itself into the very fabric of the web which means publishers, developers and users now depend on it to stay up-and-running at all times. If it’s not able to do so, then it essentially becomes a single point of failure for a number of web sites and services.

Today, only Facebook applications and services requiring access to public streams have been affected by the outage. Tomorrow, who knows? You can no longer “like” something or login to your favorite website? How will Facebook communicate its outages going forward? What will this mean for developers whose apps rely on Facebook’s platform?These questions remain unanswered. We hope that Facebook is thinking about these things too as it struggles to fix its broken API this morning. We hope it will have an answer soon.

The T-Mobile HSPA+ network–which delivers wireless broadband speeds up to a theoretical max of 21mbps–is currently in place in test markets. T-Mobile plans to expand the high speed data network to 185 million Americans (only 34 million of which are actually T-Mobile customers) by the end of 2010.

T-Mobile is playing from deep in the hole, though. It is the smallest of the four major wireless providers in the United States, and it hasn’t offered any compelling edge to attract defectors from competing wireless networks. Sprint claims the “most reliable” 3G network. Verizon claims “biggest.” AT&T claims “fastest.” T-Mobile has Charles Barkley and Eric Clapton. Until now.

Businesses–particularly businesses interested in Windows Mobile smartphones and Windows 7-based netbooks–have good reason to look twice at T-Mobile. Aside from the HSPA+ network rollout announcement, T-Mobile has also unveiled a Dell Mini 10 netbook running Windows 7 Starter Edition, and revealed the highly-anticipated HTC HD2 smartphone.

Doing business with the smallest of the big boys has its advantages too. Being at the bottom of the wireless provider totem pole means that T-Mobile is more flexible, and tries harder. T-Mobile has some of the most generous and favorable pricing plans, and it ranks highest among the four major wireless providers for customer service.

Sprint and Verizon get to keep their titles for now. But, while its technically 3.5G, once T-Mobile gets the HSPA+ network implemented, it will capture the “fastest” 3G network crown from AT&T. Granted, it’s more a marketing bragging right than anything else, but it’s AT&T’s primary claim to fame aside from being sole provider of the Apple iPhone.

For now, the only device capable of utilizing the HSPA+ network is T-Mobile’s webConnect Rocket USB broadband modem. T-Mobile will continue to introduce devices capable of taking full advantage of the HSPA+ capabilities. However, even existing T-Mobile customers will notice improvements in 3G performance as a result of the network upgrades.

T-Mobile is not resting on its laurels or quietly accepting its fourth-place status. It was the first provider to partner with Google for the Nexus One, it is the first provider to deliver the HTC HD2, and now it will have a super-fast broadband network to back them up.

Businesses looking for a wireless provider–or considering a move from an existing wireless provider–should look seriously at what T-Mobile has to offer and examine some of the advantages that T-Mobile brings to the table.

AT&T gave Apple engineers masterclasses in wireless networking in order to address iPhone connectivity woes on the carrier’s network, says a report from the Wall Street Journal. But that’s only half of the story, as AT&T also says it’s putting a lot of effort (and money) into improving its network as well.

U.S. iPhone users have been complaining about AT&T’s network pretty much since Apple’s smartphone was first launched in 2007. And AT&T was their only option if they wanted an iPhone, , as Apple has forged an exclusive deal with the carrier in the U.S.

However, with (long-standing) rumors that Apple may soon end exclusivity with AT&T and launch a Verzion version of its popular smartphone, AT&T is ramping to beef up its network in an effort to satisfy users. As part of improving iPhone users’ experience, AT&T worked with Apple to reduce strain on its network, according to the WSJ.

AT&T reportedly flew its people to Apple’s California offices to give Apple designers a crash course in wireless networking, which ended up in regular meetings between the two parties. As a result, the WSJ report says iPhones put less load on AT&T’s network when they need to find the closest cell tower or check for text messages.

In addition to working with Apple, AT&T reportedly made improvements to its network as well. Part of a so-called 100-day network improvement plan, AT&T added new network spectrum to help with traffic handling and repositioned antennas in many locations to aid reception in office towers.

However, news of AT&T making massive improvements to its network is not a surprise. Traditionally, every June since 2007, Apple has introduced a new iPhone model, and this year is likely to be no exception. It’s unclear when Apple’s exclusive iPhone contract with AT&T will end, but some say this summer’s model might be the last one exclusive to the carrier.

Add that to continuous speculation of a Verizon-bound iPhone, and it becomes clear why AT&T is striving to improve its network. One more thing though AT&T: where is the iPhone Internet tethering you promised last year?

Searches for “Tiananmen,” “Falun Gong” and “corruption” increased by more than 10 times here on Tuesday, the day that Google began offering uncensored Chinese-language search results.

But searches for censored terms on Google’s uncensored Hong Kong search engine fell off quickly in the next few days in part because most Chinese did not rush to search for politically delicate material and also because the pages newly revealed by Google were still mostly blocked in China.

In tests over the weekend from several Chinese cities, users searching for “Tiananmen” or even the names of Chinese government leaders reliably found the site google.com.hk mysteriously inaccessible for a few minutes. The more frequently used Chinese search engine Baidu, which continues to censor its results, remained accessible no matter what users searched for.

“I heard that Google is leaving China. But I don’t care. Why should I? I’m fine with Baidu,” said Xiong Huan, 27, a software engineer in Shenyang. “And for now, there’s not much change on Google either, as long as you don’t search for sensitive info.”

Nonetheless, a significant number of people took advantage of Google’s newly unfiltered service on its first day of operation. There were about 2.5 million searches for phrases containing “Tiananmen” and about 4.7 million searches for the banned religious group “Falun Gong,” according to estimates based on data from the Google Trends and Google Keyword Tool Box.

But these are tiny numbers compared with almost 400 million Chinese Internet users, and search activity quickly returned to average levels over the next few days.

Searches for “Google” in English and Chinese were far more popular, totaling more than 20 million on Tuesday, suggesting that Google users were much more concerned about their continued access to Google’s search services than their ability to find politically delicate information.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign to eradicate pro-Google sentiments from the Internet.

Comments on social networking sites that are supportive of Google “will be deleted in a couple of seconds,” said Oiwan Lam, 38, an independent journalist and researcher who is an expert on Chinese independent media.

The China Digital Times reported that the Chinese State Council Information Office had ordered all news sites to “carefully manage the information in exchanges, comments and other interactive sessions” and “clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others that have a different tune from government policy.”

China routinely directs news coverage of delicate topics, but the restrictions relating to Google are particularly severe.

Javen Yang, 27, webmaster of a Guangzhou travel site, said that site’s staff was told on Friday to remove all comments relating to Google. “We have been told to delete posts relating to ‘some American company leaving China’ by the general webmaster, who usually receive notices from the government,” he said.

The State Council Information Office could not be reached for comment.

With domestic chat closely controlled, the contrast between the sentiments on Chinese and foreign networks is striking. The popular Chinese discussion site Tianya.cn had only a few dozen posts mentioning Google on Saturday. All of them were negative or neutral opinions of the company, whereas Chinese Twitter users generally applauded Google’s decision to offer uncensored results. Twitter has been vocal in its opposition to censorship. It, like Facebook and YouTube, cannot be reached from mainland China without special software.

Over all, Google’s move will make little difference in the short run to the average citizen.

Even if the Chinese can reliably access Google’s newly unfiltered search, it will be difficult for them to read pages the government does not want them to see. Domestic Web sites are easily gagged; foreign sites are blocked by a sophisticated firewall.

“Even though Google has stopped censoring, people cannot get access to sensitive news” without firewall circumvention software, said Ms. Lam. “The Great Firewall is still there.”

The government has never admitted the existence of such a firewall, nor the censorship directives issued to news organizations and Web sites. Unlike other nations that filter Internet access, China never gives notice that sites have been blocked — connections just fail, as if there were problems with the network.

Ultimately, indifference may prove more effective than any firewall. “I don’t worry that Google will be blocked in China completely,” said Luo Peng, a Beijing salesman.

“Just like YouTube and Facebook, my life is fine without them. I can always use other similar services that are available.”

David Foote is CEO and chief research officer, as well as cofounder, at Foote Partners of Vero Beach, Fla.

David closely tracks the hiring and human resources trends across the IT landscape. He’ll share his findings of where the recession has taken IT hiring and where the recovery will shape up. We’ll also look at what skills are going to be in demand and which ones are not. David will help those in IT, or those seeking to enter IT, identify where the new job opportunities lie.

Here are some excerpts:

David Foote: I cofounded this company with a former senior partner at McKinsey. We developed a number of products and took them out in 1997. We not only have that big IT executive and trends focus as analysts, but also very much a business focus.

We’ve also populated this company with people from the HR industry, because one of the products we are best known for is the tracking of pay and demand for IT salaries and skills.

We have a proprietary database — which I’ll be drawing from today — of about 2,000 companies in the U.S. and Canada. It covers about 95,000 IT workers. We use this base to monitor trends and to collect information about compensation and attitudes and what executives are thinking about as they manage IT departments.

For many years, IT people were basically people with deep technical skills in a lot of areas of infrastructure, systems, network, and communications. Then, the Internet happened.

All of a sudden, huge chunks of the budget in IT moved into lines of business. That opened the door for a lot of IT talent that wasn’t simply defined as technical, but also customer facing and with knowledge of the business, the industry, and solutions. We’ve been seeing a maturation of that all along.

What’s happened in the last three years is that, when we talk about workforce issues and trends, the currency in IT is much more skills versus jobs, and part of what’s inched that along has been outsourcing.

If you need to get something done, you can certainly purchase that and hire people full-time, or you can rent it by going anywhere in the world — Vietnam, Southeast Asia, India, or many other places. Essentially, you are just purchasing a market basket of skills. Or, these days, you can give it over to somebody, and by that I mean managed services, which is the new form of what has been traditionally called “outsourcing.”

It’s not so much about hiring, but about how we determine what skills we need, how we find those, and how we execute. What’s really happened in two or three years is that the speed at which decisions are made and then implemented has gotten to the point where you have to make decisions in a matter of days and weeks, and not months.

There have been some interesting behaviors during this recession that I haven’t seen in prior recessions. That lead me to believe that people have really resisted the temptation to reduce cost at the expense of what the organization will look like in 2011 or 2012, when we are past this recession and are back into business as usual.

People have learned something. That’s been a big difference in the last three years. … Unemployment in IT is usually half of what it is in the general job market, if you look at Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) numbers. I can tell you right now that jobs, in terms of unemployment in IT, have really stabilized.

In the last three months [of 2009] there was a net gain of 11,200 jobs in these five [IT] categories. If you look at the previous eight months, prior to September, there was a loss of 31,000 jobs.

So going into 2010, the services industry will absolutely be looking for talent. There’s going to be probably a greater need for consultants and companies looking for help in a lot of the execution. That’s because there are still a lot of hiring restrictions out there right now. Companies simply cannot go to the market to find bodies, even if they wanted to.

Companies are still very nervous about hiring, or to put it this way, investing in full-time talent, when the overhead on a full-time worker is usually 80-100 percent of their salaries. If they can find that talent somewhere else, they are going to hire it.

There are certain areas, for example, like security, where there is a tendency to not want to hire talent outside, because this is too important to a company. There are certain legacy skills that are important, but in terms of things like security, a lot of the managed services that have been purchased in 2009 were small- to medium-sized companies that simply don’t have big IT staffs.

If you have 5,000, 6,000, or 7,000 people working in IT, you’re probably going to do a lot of your own security, but small and medium size have not, and that’s an extremely hot area right now to be working in.

We track the value of skills and premium pay for skills, and the only segment of IT that has actually gained value, since the recession started in 2007, is security, and it has been progressive. We haven’t seen a downturn in its value in one quarter.

Since 2007, when this recession started, overall the market value of security certs is up 3 percent. But if you look at all 200 certified skills that we track in this survey that we do of 406 skills, overall skills have dropped about 6.5 percent in value, but security certifications are up 2.9.

It is a tremendous place to be right now. We’ve asked people exactly what skills they’re hiring, and they have given us this list: forensics, identity and access management, intrusion detection and prevention systems, disk file-level encryption solutions, including removable media, data leakage prevention, biometrics, web content filters, VoIP security, some application security, particularly in small to medium sized companies (SMBs), and governance, compliance, and audit, of course.

The public sector has been on a real tear. As you do, we get a lot of privileged information. One of the things that we have heard from a number of sources, I can’t tell you the reason why, is that a lot of recruiting is happening in the private sector right now with the National Security Agency and Homeland Security — in-the-trenches people.

I think there was a feeling that there weren’t enough real deep technical, in-the-trenches kind of talent, in security. There were a lot of policy people, but not enough actual talent. Because of the Cyber Security Initiative, particularly under the current administration, there has been a lot of hiring.

Managed services looks like one of the hottest areas right now, especially in networking and communication: Metro Ethernet, VPNs, IP voice, and wireless security. And if you look at the wireless security market right now, it’s a (US)$9 billion market in Europe. It’s a $5.7 billion market in Asia-Pacific. But in North America it’s between $4 and 5 billion.

There’s a lot of activity in wireless security. We have to go right down into every one of these segments. I could give you an idea of where the growth is spurting right now. North America is not leading a lot of this. Other parts of the world are leading this, which gives our companies opportunities to play in those markets as well.

For many years, as you know, Dana, it was everybody taking on America, but now America is taking on the rest of the world. They’re looking at opportunities abroad, and that’s had a bigger impact on labor as well. If you’re building products and forming alliances and partnerships with companies abroad, you’re using their talent and you’re using your talent in their countries. There is this global labor arbitrage, global workforce, that companies have right now, and not just the North American workforce.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) on Monday launched a one-two punch with its new Power7 processors, which the company claims have twice the performance of the Power6 line but consume less power.

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A Power7 ceramic module with a lid is shown here bottom side facing up. Each Power7 processor contains eight cores, with four threads per core.

(click image to enlarge)

These processors power IBM’s Unix servers, four new models of which were also unveiled Monday in a move that might strengthen IBM’s position in the Unix server market.

The Power7’s Tech Specs

The Power7 uses a 45 nanometer process. Each Power7 processor has up to eight cores and four threads per core. That’s four times the maximum number of cores and eight times the number of threads per chip as the Power6.

The Power7 has a TurboCore mode, which is optimized for database and other transaction-oriented workloads. This runs with four cores active and with most of the resources from the other four cores behind the eight active cores. Doing this gives the four active cores more cache memory and memory bandwidth and increases their clock speeds.

Power7 technology has “intelligent threads,” meaning the number of threads varies depending on the workload. More threads increase total capacity, and fewer threads increase individual processing tasks, such as real-time analytics and database transactions.

Active Memory Expansion, a new Power7 technology, dynamically adjusts the amount of compressed memory required based on a workload’s needs. This expands the memory capacity of Power7 systems without requiring the installation of more physical memory. A server using Active Memory Expansion can handle up to 65 percent more transactions or users than servers without this feature, according the IBM’s estimates.

Intelligent Energy technology in the Power7s lets customers power on and off various parts of the system, or dynamically increase or decrease processor clock speeds based on thermal conditions and system utilization. They can do this on a single server or across a pool of multiple servers.

More Bang for the Buck

IBM probably managed to increase the Power7’s processing capability while reducing its power requirements by shrinking the die, Carl Howe, director of anywhere research at the Yankee Group, told TechNewsWorld. “That will reduce your power consumption and put more cores on the die,” he explained. “It’s simple geometry.”

The latest processors have a high degree of power management through very refined clock gating, Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at In-Stat, told TechNewsWorld. This lets the processor shut down the parts that are not required in a transaction or a process, he explained.

In addition to offering more performance, Power7 could change the market, Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, contended. “With Power7, IBM is shifting the focus from mere processor evolution to systems-wide innovation,” he told TechNewsWorld. “As vendors of every sort have moved towards multi-core, multi-threaded solution development, the value of the microprocessor has increasingly become just one part of overall system quality.”

Battles in the Unix Market

IBM on Monday launched four servers based on the Power7 processor. The Power 770 and 780 are based on modular designs and will accommodate up to 64 Power7 cores; the other two are the Power 750 Express and the Power 755.

These are positioned against Intel’s Itanium processor, which powers Unix servers from HP (NYSE: HPQ).

The processors will power servers in the Unix market, which Pund-IT’s King said racks up US$16 billion in sales annually. IBM’s and Intel’s new processors unveiled Monday indicate the battle for control of the Unix and Linux markets is still raging.

“IBM moved from third place to first place in the Unix server market, with about 40 percent of the sector’s sales, by delivering better systems performance, increased energy efficiency and a forward-thinking road map,” King explained.

What about Sun’s Sparc, which Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) pledged to support at the Jan. 27 briefing on Oracle’s roadmap with Sun? “The No. 1 product beneath our installed database is Sun,” Oracle copresident Charles Phillips said at the briefing. He pledged to make Sun the gold standard for computing for servers running Oracle’s products.

Power7 systems may pull well ahead of those powered by the Sun Sparc and Intel Itanium, King contended. “Both HP’s Itanium-based servers and Sun’s UltraSparc servers have been stuck in the doldrums, and there’s nothing on the horizon which indicates that either company will provide anything close to the performance of the Power7,” he said. “While Intel’s launch of Tukwila Monday seems to be designed to keep IBM from hogging the spotlight completely, there appears to be more meat in the Power7 announcement.”

Locking Horns With Intel

Meanwhile, after many delays, Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) announced its Itanium 9300 series processor, previously code-named “Tukwila,” in San Francisco Monday. This has 2 billion transistors, four cores, and eight threads per processor through enhanced Intel Hyper-Threading Technology. The Tukwila offers up to eight times the interconnect bandwidth, five times the memory bandwidth; and up to seven times the memory capacity of its predecessor using DDR3 components, Intel said.

Yet another chipmaker, AMD (NYSE: AMD), has promised to unveil its own multicore processor, the 12-core Opteron “Magny-Cours,” in the first quarter of this year