Apple blunder confirms imminent Nehalem Xserve launch

In what appears to be a slip-up on one of its international online stores, Apple has inadvertently revealed that it plans to announce shortly new Xserves featuring Intel Corp.'s Nehalem-based Xeon processors.

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:

Apple almost ready with Nehalem-based Xserves

More proof of Nehalem Xserves; may ship with OS X 10.5.7