Rumor: Xserve refresh coming up soon

Sorry for what looks like an obvious (DUH) comment, I posted this before the new Xserve announcement, but did not confirm until now...good news, I was right :)

Yes the Mini can be an excellent little server if it fits the app. It isn't a big iron server though.

Now the question is, is Apple a successful big iron server company. I'd have to say no. That isn't easy to admit to but you don't here about a lit of server farms runnning Apple hardware. At least not for the types of work that you would suspect for large corporate type computing.

What I could see Apple doing is refocusing XServe on a slightly different market segment, that is the high performance computing segment. Think about these as OpenCL optimized servers. Thus one of Nvidas or ATIs OpenCL compliant GPU processors would be includeded in each machine. The question then becomes is this on board the motherboard or supplied as an expansion card? Either way Apple would need to dramatically reconfigure their 1U server and possibly offer up a thicker model for additional OpenCL compliant cards.

I know many will see this as a stretch but I believe Apple has huge opportunities here if they work OpenCL into the server line up. They have had some success selling servers to technical users and this capability would extend that demand. This biggest negative is that power demand would go up a bit. For many though the gains would offset the bill.

So what do you think guys, will Apple put forth an effort to go after the high performance computing server market? Will the wedge be OpenCL and it's applicability across all Apple hardware?


Dave