Intel today officially announced the first products based on the much-discussed Sandy Bridge CPU architecture, and first impressions are highly favorable, with my take being that Sandy Bridge represents the first step in a very aggressive product road map for Intel in 2011.

Sandy Bridge is the next architectural spin after Intel’s Westmere shrink of the predecessor Nehalem architecture (the “tick” in Intel’s famous “tick-tock” progression of architectural changes followed by process shrink) and incorporates some major innovations compared to the previous architecture:

• Minor but in toto significant changes to many aspects of the low-level microarchitecture – more registers, better prefetch, changes to the way instructions and operands are decode, cached and written back to registers and cache.
• Major changes in integration of functions on the CPU die – Almost all major subsystems, including CPU, memory controller, graphics controller and PCIe controller, are now integrated onto the same die, along with the ability to share data with much lower latency than in previous generations. In addition to more efficient data sharing, this level of integration allows for better power efficiency.
• Improvements to media processing – A dedicated video transcoding engine and an extended vector instruction set for media and floating point calculations improves Sandy Bridge capabilities in several major application domains.

Within 24 hours, InfoWorld published two seemingly unrelated articles. One covered HP's announcement of its intent to acquire Palm, which led people to speculate aloud, "What the heck were they thinking?" The first part of the article spent a couple of paragraphs musing about how this move might or might not help HP's interest in the slate computer market. The path from acquiring Palm to becoming an iPad competitor isn't very clear, however, so maybe the real point has nothing to do with slate computers. We can't get enough of talking about slate computers, but what if Palm's products have some potential connection to HP's existing portfolio? Crazy idea, I know.

The next day, InfoWorld published another article with the acidic headline, "Smartphone management becoming a nightmare":

Smartphones and mobile devices are becoming a nightmare for IT shops to manage, with users carrying multiple types of phones with different operating systems and expecting access to email, video-conferencing, and various types of corporate applications.

In other words, IT departments struggling with these standardization efforts might want to talk to a company that can help. Say, someone with a lot of products and services for solution areas like cloud computing, application transformation, portfolio and asset management. It'd be great if said vendor had mobile technology that factored into these larger IT infrastructure concerns.

Oh, yeah...