Outlook 98 is one of the first products to include leveraged code. Microsoft's latest incarnation of Outlook's notoriously quirky messaging client and personal information manager (PIM) makes good use of IE's rendering engine. Developers used the rendering engine to construct the Outlook Today summary page.
However, this internal platform and product inbreeding will further heat the Microsoft and DOJ legal debate. If the DOJ decides against Microsoft, the decision will likely affect the entire company because of the proliferation of IE. Simply put, an unfavorable decision will derail many seemingly unrelated projects that depend on IE.
A good example is Office 9x, the industry standard for application suites. The development team is reportedly leveraging the IE rendering engine in Office 9x, obscuring the distinction between browser and operating system (OS). According to Microsoft, Office 9x will now be equally at home in an Internet environment and a traditional LAN environment. With the suite's new Web-oriented capabilities, such as native file format support for HTML and Extensible Markup Language (XML), users will be able to edit Web-hosted HTML and XML documents from within the IE browser interface. And the suite's ability to save files to any FrontPage-enabled Web site might spell the end of file servers as we know them.
However, the most important change in Office 9x doesn't concern the Web but rather modularization. The development team is designing this version to run on several platforms, from a full-blown Pentium II PC to a low-footprint Windows-based Terminal Server session. That improvement will likely make the user community happy.
Xeon, Warrior CPU
No, Xeon does not refer to the heroine fighting evil villains on your TV set. Nor does it refer to the inert gas that helps light up the signs in storefront windows. Xeon refers to Intel's Xeon CPU architecture, which will become an integral component in Windows NT-oriented symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) boxes from Compaq and others.
A server-centric version of the Pentium II CPU, the Xeon-based system will feature a full-speed backside bus and up to 2MB of Level 2 cache. The Xeon CPU architecture will connect to the system through the same 100MHz system bus that first appeared in 350MHz and 400MHz Deschutes-based PCs earlier this year, albeit via a more robust connector (i.e., Slot 2).
To accelerate adoption of Xeon (and the phasing out of Pentium Pro), Intel will slowly release a range of home-grown system board configurations that will serve as the basis for new servers. For example, Intel's low-end Nightshade platform, which is based on the 440BX chipset, will include two Xeon processors and support up to 1GB of RAM. In the third quarter, Intel plans to deliver a 4-way Xeon platform based on the forthcoming 440NX chipset. This new board will support up to 8GB of RAM and will feature hot-plug PCI connectors. Finally, Intel plans to deliver its Saber 8-way platform in the fourth quarter. This platform will be the first implementation of the Profusion SMP technology Intel acquired from Corollary late last year. Although Corollary originally designed Profusion as a Pentium Pro solution, Intel decided to forgo the aging chip's transition problems in favor of a Xeon-based design. Given the challenge Axil Computer and its OEMs faced in migrating customers off Pentium Pro, Corollary's decision is a smart one.
How fast will Xeon-based servers be? No benchmark numbers are available yet, but most experts agree that a performance boost of 50 percent or more over similarly equipped Pentium Pro SMP boxes is a reasonable projection. Unlike earlier Pentium II processors, Xeon doesn't suffer from a half-speed Level 2 cache. Like the Pentium Pro's interface into cache memory, Xeon's interface runs at the same speed as the processor's internal clock. If you factor in the higher internal frequency and the 100MHz system bus (which should help compensate for the added overhead of a 4-way 400MHz configuration), the performance increase will likely be phenomenal.
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