I'm just back from a two week vacation and catching up on things. Happy New Year!! 2007 should be an exciting year, there are many innovations and products to look forward to. Some that have my interest are:

• OpenSPARC - The community is forming and growing. I expected to see more innovation occurring and people using OpenSPARC T1 in ways we haven't anticipated. Academic interesting is very strong and we should see courses at various Universities using OpenSPARC T1 in their teaching materials.
• Multi-Core CPUS - Multi-Core systems are really coming into the mainstream with AMD and Intel focused on both dual-core and quad-core processors. Sun will be announcing Niagara 2 based systems this year. Very exiting and these products will continue pushing the CMT (chip multi threading) architecture to higher levels of performance and integration. Sun APL systems will be introduced with multi-core/multi-threaded CPUs. IBM will introduce Power6.
• Java - With Java now licensed under GPLv2, what innovation we will see there?
• Virtualization - Driving the push for virtualization is cost reduction through server consolidation, dynamic provisioning, and disaster recovery. Multi-core CPUs bring a lot of processing power and consolidation is one way to effectively use it.
• Gaming - There will be a new set of games that will really start to take advantage of multi-core cpus and with dual HD screens and high quality audio, games will be more immersive with more realistic physic modeling. Thats just for PC based games. On the console side, with PlayStation3, Nitendo Wii and Microsoft Xbox 360 released, there will be a three way battle to see which console will have the best suite of games.

Should be a great year and to start us out, Sun has just announced new enhanced Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 systems. The major enhancements being faster CPUs (1.4 Ghz) and 64GB memory configuration. Look here.