November 11th, 2005
Where are the dual core Xserves?
The announcement of Apple’s new dual-core Power Mac G5s last month was a much needed shot-in-the-arm for the company’s desktop lineup but the new chips left a gaping hole in the product line. The machines that arguably need the increased horsepower that the dual-core chips provide the most—Apple’s Xserve—we’re passed over for the promotion. There are a couple of theories as to why the Xserve hasn’t gone dual-core just yet:
1. Apple is allocating all of the new zippy new dual-core chips for the shiny desktop G5s, because they’re in higher demand.
2. PowerMac G5s have a higher profit margin than the Xserve.
3. Apple’s server applications, Workgroup Manager, Xserve RAID, Xsan, etc. aren’t optimized to take advantage of the dual-core architecture and thus wouldn’t benefit from it.
4. Apple is skipping the dual-core chips in favor of jumping straight into Intel chips in their servers.
I suspect that the actual reason for the lack of dual-core Xserves is more because chips are being allocated to the desktop Macs (The Power Mac Quad is still not shipping) than the software reason or that they’re going to jump straight to Intel, but who knows.
So will the Xserve ever get a dual-core chip? I suspect that it will after Apple gets enough quantity of the chips to satisfy the demand for new Power Macs. I hope that Apple isn’t spending a lot of R&D resources on the Intel Xserve, because while great, they can sell a whole lot more Intel PowerBooks.
Jason D. O'Grady is the editor of PowerPage.org, which has been publishing daily mobile technology news since December 1995. For disclosures on Jason's industry affiliations, click here or to view Jason's full profile click here.
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