Revisiting the early days of blade servers, Hewlett-Packard will use Intel's Pentium M processor, designed for mobile computers, in a new slim server expected early in the third quarter.
HP will upgrade its ProLiant BL10e blade server with a 1GHz Pentium M, a processor code-named "Banias" that should boost performance over the current 900MHz ultra-low-voltage Pentium III used in the current product, Sally Stevens, director of blade servers for HP's Industry Standard Server group, said in an interview. The Pentium M comes with 1MB of high-speed cache memory rather than the 512KB in the Pentium III and supports faster double data rate (DDR) memory. "There's a nice opportunity for enhanced performance," Stevens said.
Keeping momentum in the Intel server market is crucial for HP, which acquired Compaq Computer in 2002, in part for the ProLiant line. HP had the biggest fraction of the $16.4 billion market for servers using Intel or Intel-compatible processors in 2002, but IBM and Dell Computer are gaining, and even Intel-phobic Sun Microsystems has entered the fray with its own Intel servers. In addition, by the end of April, HP will ship an upgraded dual-processor blade, the BL20p, that includes 3.06GHz Xeon processors instead of the 2.8GHz currently used, Stevens said. The new processor includes a 533MHz front-side bus--the connection between the chip and its memory--compared with the 400MHz predecessor.
The new BL10e harkens back to the earliest days of blade servers, systems that fit side by side into a single chassis with shared gear such as power supplies and network connections. Those first systems, pioneered by start-ups such as RLX Technologies, used technology lifted from laptops to keep power consumption low so servers can be packed densely without overheating.
News source: C|net
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