The new Banias blade from HP won't outperform Xeon machines, but it is likely to outrun the single-processor competition, Eunice said. "Consider what it's competing against -- other Pentium III designs, the even more modestly powered Transmeta Crusoe, or Sun blades running at just 650MHz," Eunice said. "Though it's not going to impress going up against the heavyweight multiprocessor Xeon blades, Pentium M fits pretty nicely among the blade crowd." IBM plans single-processor blade models, Intel server chief technology officer Tom Bradicich told News.com in March, but an IBM representative said on Friday that those models will use Xeon processors, not the Pentium M. Processors that consume less power is an option in the future, but customers aren't asking for it now, and Big Blue is currently happy with Xeon's balance of price and performance. Dell declined to comment on its plans. Low-end uniprocessor blades are still good for many network tasks, such as handing out Internet addresses to PCs as they log onto a network, serving up Web pages or directing Web surfers' computers to the proper addresses as they browse the Internet, said Paul Miller, director of platforms for HP's Industry Standard Server group. Some early blades built with laptop technology, including those using laptop processors from Transmeta, were missing one feature important feature demanded in the server world: error-correcting code that can fix some occasional mix-ups when ones and zeros are being transmitted on and off the chip. Newer blades fix this problem. HP has shipped about 20,000 blades since January 2002, when the BL10e was launched. Roughly two-thirds of those were BL10e models, but now that the dual-processor BL20p and four-processor BL40p are shipping, some momentum is shifting to the higher-end models. More than 50 percent of blades are shipping with an optional network switch embedded, Stevens said, with a higher rate for the two- and four-processor machines. And more than 80 percent are using HP's Remote Deployment Pack, a utility that makes it easier to install software on large numbers of servers. IBM plans Unix blades using its Power processors for the second half of 2003, and HP is considering a similar Unix move with its PA-RISC chips. "We're still looking at when is the right time to introduce that architecture," Miller said. "We think we're on a very strong path to do this." Key to making the move will be further customer demand and unified software management tools so PA-RISC blades and Intel blades can coexist easily in the same chassis, he said.
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