Apple went to great pains to deliver design and performance improvements that are evident on first look and use and will be welcomed by data center managers.
The new Xserve base model sports two 64-bit dual-core Xeon "Woodcrest" processors running at 2 GHz; 1GB of 667-MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM RAM; a single 80GB 3Gbit/sec. Serial ATA (SATA) Apple Drive Module; onboard dual Ethernet; a Combo drive; single power supply; no expansion cards; a built-in ATI Radeon X1300 PCI Express graphics card with 64MB of GDDR3 synchronous dynamic RAM; and Mac OS X Server unlimited client software. Base Price: $2,999. That's quite a punch at such a low price.
The OS X server software included is a 100% native, 64-bit unified operating system with many of the included applications -- like MySQL and Java Application server -- also bumped up to take advantage of the 64-bit processors. As in previous versions, the Xserve motherboard is held in place by captive thumbscrews that require no special tools to open.