Intel reported record highs in the second quarter of 2010 in terms of revenues, gross margin, operating profits and earnings per share, thanks to explosive sales driven by enterprise IT purchases. Many firms had put off upgrading their computer systems and servers but are now moving forward with hardware upgrade plans. In many cases, the upgrades are necessary to avoid added costs of maintaining obsolete or slow computers.

IT Buying Has Slowed In Recent Years

During this recession, consumers, rather than enterprise-level purchasers have largely driven the pace of computer chip sales. Enterprise purchasing has been put on hold as companies try to stretch their existing hardware inventory to save money. The end result of this kind of economy is noticeably slower computer performance and pent-up demand for faster computers.

Now, enterprise level purchasers are at the point where hardware replacement isn’t an option. At the same time, Microsoft has introduced a new version of their Windows OS that is much more palatable to the enterprise-level users, in large part because Microsoft has also upgraded its server platforms.

Intel and other chip makers are now the beneficiaries of past years’ corporate economy. What can corporate IT consumers expect to gain from the newest chip sets? First, corporate users gain the ability to dual-boot, which means experimentation with Linux, Macintosh and other non-Microsoft operating systems. IT departments may begin to offer the functions their users want without having to manage multiple desktop platforms.

Second, on the server side, corporate IT departments will have more flexibility to virtualize servers. Virtual servers can free the corporation from having to maintain separate servers for enterprise-level functions.

Third, corporate IT deployments may begin to take advantage of larger memory-addressing capacity – another side of the server virtualization coin. The latest chipsets will begin to break the traditional memory addressing barriers by offering workaround solutions that will both enable a larger cache of installed memory and faster processing for server-based computing.

In the mean time, computer users can recover some of the “speed potential” of their desktop installations by increasing the amount of installed memory on desktop units, and by performing regular maintenance on computers, such as defragmenting the hard drive and performing registry maintenance with a trusted registry cleaner like RegCure.

By performing regular maintenance on computer systems, users can expect to maintain or improve the performance of their existing systems and in some cases, can even delay the need to upgrade computer hardware.

Photo Credit: Uwe Hermann, via Flickr