Intel announced 16 new processors

Intel has come out with a wave of new x86 processors - 16, in fact. Fifteen of them are optimized for use in servers. Features like larger cache help server performance out.

The second computer I ever bought was one of the very early x86 computer systems: the Zenith Z-100. Zenith/Heath introduced it in the early 1980s, just after the IBM PC came out.

I spent part of 1983 or 1984 at home on weekends/evenings doing a little x86 programming project for a coworker. It was a library of low-level graphics routines, written in x86 assembly language.

I spent a lot of time from 1986-2001 writing x86 assembly language, as well as debugging x86 written by myself and others that was written in C.

Back then, we did not have source-level, symbolic debuggers like we got in the mid-1990s. It was pretty primative in the 1980s.

I spent the last half of the 1980s doing embedded systems programming. Back then, you were happy if your C compiler generated correct code and did not crash. I had both things happen to me more than once - though it was rare then and rarer now.

I wrote all kinds of graphics and communications software in x86 assembly language. Even in the mid-1990s, I had to use my knowledge of the instruction set to debug faulty C++ code generation once or twice.

So even after I switched from coding in assembly language to writing code in C and C++, that earlier knowledge was still paying off.

Lucky for me, x86 architecture has wound up totally dominating the desktop computer marketplace. Windows, Macintosh, and Linux - they are all based on x86 now. No indication that will change for the rest of this decade.

Thanks to continual performance enhancements from Intel, they all run faster every year!