Apple Computer at its World Wide Developers Conference announced the new Xserve, a quad Xeon, 64-bit server featuring Mac OS X Server Tiger on two Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors running up to 3.0 GHz, resulting in performance that is over five times that of its predecessor.

"With an industry-leading high bandwidth server architecture that includes PCI Express, independent 1.33 GHz front side buses with 4MB of shared L2 cache, and fully-buffered DIMMs (FB-DIMMs), the new Xserve delivers up to four times the I/O bandwidth, up to three times the memory bandwidth and twice the storage bandwidth of the Xserve G5," the Apple company said.

The new Xserve is Apple's most customizable server yet with over one million possible build to order configurations, including faster processors, larger hard drives and dual power supplies.

"Xserve has always been the perfect server for Mac workgroups and now it will run over five times faster for the same breakthrough price," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "With new Intel processors, a redesigned hardware architecture, and an unlimited Tiger Server client access license, no one can offer better price performance and manageability in a 1U server."

Xserves can be configured with two Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors running either 2.0, 2.66 or 3.0 GHz. It also supports up to 32GB of 667 MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM memory with twice the capacity and three times the bandwidth of the Xserve G5. Two eight-lane PCI Express expansion slots provide up to 2GB/s of throughput each to support the next generation of fibre channel, networking and graphics cards.

Apple is offering vast storage flexibility with support for up to three 3Gb/s SATA or SAS drives that can achieve an unrivaled 2.25TB of hot-plug storage in a 1U server while advanced thermal management capabilities take advantage of the low power of the Intel processors, running as low as 65W.