Know your CPUs

I remember the days when all your needed to know if your 486 was SX or DX. Now? You have Dual Core, Core Duo, Pentium, Core 2, and bla bla bla.

Why is it important to know your CPUs? I will use another example that happened to me!

While on medical leave we bought 4 DELL R610 (Last week of March). During the first week of April I was invited to a breakfast hosted by Intel Chile. At this presentation Eduardo Godoy did a fantastic job in explaining what was new at Intel. One of the new things was the new 5600 family of CPUs.

The next day, I went to another breakfast but this time hosted by DELL Chile. It was in part the same sales line. The new CPUs that were available in Chile as of March 18th. I was then very happy because we had purchased the Servers after this date so I had the new 5600s! This was perfect because the Servers were for the new VMWare Farm and according to Intel the new 5600s had a 29% better performance with Virtualization!

But to my surprise we were sold the 5500s! Sniff!

What was the lesson? Find out what is in the pipeline so you can plan your purchases, and if you can wait a few weeks or months do it! According to Intel the policy is to launch the new CPU at the same price of the retiring CPU.

Also! Go to all your vendors events (even if they are not your vendors or the band you buy), you will be up to date with Technology and Software, you will know what the trend is and best of all, you will have all the tools you need to make better decisions.

Just to mention, this week I am attending a Microsoft event (where my friend Oscar Soto from ActiveTrainer), a Symantec event and Novared a local vendors event.

Have fun!

The Captain.