AppleInsider Staff
As of Thursday evening, the Xserve product page (by way of PCWorld) for the Apple Store Hong Kong includes a broken graphic with an underlying caption indicating that the Mac maker is almost ready to begin accepting orders for the new 1U rack-mount servers.
"Preorder the new Xserve with Intel Xeon (Nehalem)," the caption says.
The image link is not yet functional and instead takes shoppers back to the current Xserve listing on the Hong Kong store. Nevertheless, the discovery is undeniable confirmation of a pair of AppleInsider reports (1, 2) from earlier this week which predicted a launch of new Nehalem-based Xserves within the next two weeks.
The new models are expected to use chips from same family of "Gainestown" Xeon 5500 and "Bloomfield" Xeon 3500 series of processors that the Cupertino-based company adopted for its latest line of Mac Pro workstations last month.
Also likely are changes to the systems Ethernet Controller Chips, which discoveries in unreleased versions of Mac OS X 10.5.7 suggest will come from Marvell's Yukon 2 series chips. For additional details, AppleInsider's earlier reports:
Charles Martin
Marko Zivkovic
Wesley Hilliard
Andrew Orr
Malcolm Owen
David Schloss
5 Comments
Not that I need or can justify an XServe right now, but it is good that Apple is keeping on top of things. I'm also very interested in what Apple will install in these as storage. It would be nice to see system stored on SSD and data to magnetic as a hybrid solution.
Dave
This coming Tuesday.
Just in case there were some who didn't think Apple would use Nehalem in an xServe...
2U server please! We can live without Xserve RAID but it would be nice to have a server that could support a bigger RAID setup for fast database performance. 2U would allow for 4 PCI Express slots (thinking of those new SSD PCI Express drives coming out) as well and 18 DIMM slots would be nice too.
Seconded. A 2U Xserve would allow for more hard drives. Please, Apple?!