Market-share figures released Wednesday by research firm IDC bear out Golden's view of Big Blue. According to the IDC report, HP racked up 32 percent of the $4.3bn (£2.7bn) in sales of Intel servers worldwide in the third quarter of 2002. Dell claimed 21 percent and IBM, 17 percent. Growth trends favour IBM and Dell, though, IDC researchers said. IBM's revenue increased 22 percent from the year-ago quarter, Dell's rose 8 percent, but HP's dropped 7 percent. For eight-processor servers, HP was king of the heap in the third quarter a year ago with 50 percent of sales, beating out IBM's 15 percent. In the same quarter this year, IBM had 42 percent and HP 40 percent in the market, valued at $185m, IDC said. IBM's eight-processor server revenue increased from $28m in the third quarter of 2001 to $63m this year. Behind this reversal of fortune, to some extent, were the particulars of new Intel processors. IBM's x440 server was able to use the new-generation Xeon MP, but HP decided to skip that product in its coming "F8" chipset-based servers because the chip's performance in multiprocessor servers didn't meet expectations. Specifically, the first Xeon MP had less high-speed cache memory than its predecessor; IBM compensated with a huge 32MB cache in the x440. HP had said that its F8-based machines were awaiting a new Xeon with 2MB of cache memory. Golden said the servers, code-named Lightning 2, will ship in the first quarter of 2003. The new 2MB cache Xeon MP, code-named Gallatin, is available now. Blades are another area of activity. IBM has shipped 200 blade servers thus far to early customers including AOL Time Warner, which, it said, is using them to run America Online email software. Whitney said its blade servers will be generally available "in a couple of weeks". IBM's first blade systems, named BladeCenter, use dual Xeon processors. Coming in 2003 will be blades with four Xeons, better for higher-powered tasks such as running large Microsoft Exchange email servers. If a customer needs more than a handful of dual-Xeon systems, using a BladeCenter will be less expensive than buying separate rack-mounted servers, Whitney said. The BladeCenter chassis also accommodates blades using IBM's Power processor, and IBM will begin selling that product next year. Individual blades cost $1,879 apiece; the chassis, including a network switch, starts at $2,789. On blades, Linux is a popular operating system, Whitney said, with about half of customers using the Unix clone. "We see Linux as a big driver in the blades," she said. A major perceived barrier to Linux's adoption on high-end servers is its ability to take advantage of all processors in a system. Linux can exploit eight-processor servers today, and in some emerging markets, it's used on those systems. In China, for example, "half of eight-way servers are Linux," Whitney said.
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