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IBM Argentina Under Investigation
Look for a familiar name to crop up at some point in the ongoing fiscal turmoil in Argentina. Recent filings before the Argentine Federal Court indicate that several IBM Argentina executives are among the 17 politicians and businessmen being investigated for the fraudulent use of funds from multimillion dollar contracts between Big Blue and the government. There are several different cases under investigation at this time, totaling over $100 million worth of misused government funds. One of the primary cases under investigation involves IBM and Banco Nacion.

IBM Adds Speed to Power
Industry insiders are keeping a close eye on just how much power IBM will be able to deliver in the next iteration of its high-end iSeries servers—and it may be more than expected. Late last year, there had been worries that the company’s forthcoming line of Power processors would not be able to keep pace with commodity processors from Intel or RISC chips from Sun, HP or Fujitsu. However, sources say Big Blue has big plans for both its large and small servers with regard to the future Power5 processors. (The current line of iSeries and pSeries servers feature Power4 and Power4+ processors.) IBM apparently plans to build its next-generation Power5 chips into the iSeries product line, bringing unprecedented power to OS/400, Linux and AIX workloads. By all accounts, all that power is still a while away from delivery—maybe. It was previously expected to reach the market only late in 2005. However, we hear the company has lit a fire under the development team involved in the effort, and now expects the Power5 chips to hit the market almost a year earlier, in late 2004. We hear IBM plans to achieve this goal by reaching 2GHz clock speeds while working with the current 0.13 micron process. The primary reasoning for the accelerated schedule is to keep pace with HP's 128-way "Superdome" servers, which are expected later this year.