After all, Apple is due to release another server.

At last year’s Macworld, Apple suggested that Intel’s Tulsa could find its way into future Xserves. The Tulsa is Intel’s dual-core Xeon 7100 series processor designed for multi-processor servers. Intel claims it delivers up to twice the performance and nearly three times better performance per Watt than previous Intel Xeon processors. That translates to a lower total cost of ownership which, in these days of ballooning energy prices, is music to the ears of enterprise.

From January 2003 to January 2005, Apple released a new Xserve each year, breaking stride in August 2006 when they released the current Xserve model, the Q57 —  the first Xserve with Intel processors. Although introduced in August 2006, the first one shipped three months later in November 2006.

The Q57 sports four cores with the Intel Xeon 5100 series processor (the “Woodcrest”), available in dual 2.0, dual 2.66 or dual 3.0 GHz with 4MB shared L2 cache per processor and a dual 1.33 GHz System Bus. It has three drive bays and eight FB-DIMM slots, maxing out at 32GB of 667MHz DDR2 ECC DIMMs. In November 2006 when it first shipped, the OS was v. 10.4.8 of Mac OS X Server (build 8N1215) but now ships with the latest Leopard release of OS X, OS X Server v. 10.5.1.

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