Apple Introduces Its 64-bit Xserve G5

Apple this week introduced its 64-bit Xserve G5. The architecture provides a front-side bus dedicated to each CPU as well as up to 8-GB DDR SDRAM with ECC protection. Xserve G5 also features dual Gigabit Ethernet on the motherboard. Pricing starts at $2,999 for either the single processor unit or a cluster node, and tops off at $6,599 for the "ultimate" version, which is custom built.

The company is promoting the computer as having performance rivaling much bigger devices. According to Apple, the Xserve G5's two double-precision floating-point units allow it to perform linear equations in LINPACK 8 percent faster than 3.2-GHz Xeon-based servers and 50 percent faster than the 2-GHz Opteron-based server. It also offers up to 750GB of storage.

The hardware is rack friendly; at just 1.75 inches thick, an array of up to 84 G5 processors can be deployed in a 42U rack.

The Xserve cluster node configuration is targeted at high performance computing environments as well as for workgroup clusters. The G5 processor supports up to 215 simultaneous in-flight instructions with a high-bandwidth execution core offering over 12 discrete functional units, including dual floating-point units and dual integer units, to process immense instructions in parallel.

The product includes the Unix-based Mac OS X Server operating system, providing support for Mac, Windows, UNIX or Linux clients.