IBM Corp wants a bigger piece of the enterprise Windows server market, and the new xSeries 440 server, codenamed "Vigil," that was announced yesterday as part of Intel's "Foster" Xeon MP processor rollout, is part of IBM's long-range plan to do its own engineering at the high end and bring more money to the top and bottom line from its Intel-based server business, writes Timothy Prickett Morgan.
The eight-way xSeries 440, which IBM is showing off at the CeBIT trade show in Hannover, Germany today, is a big brother to the xSeries 360 four-way server that Big Blue announced last November. Both the xSeries 360 and xSeries 440 machines are based on IBM's XA-32 chipset (formerly known by the codename "Summit"), which will support SMP configurations with 4, 8, 12 or 16 processors.
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