Armonk (NY) - IBM will offer its System x servers with Intel's upcoming Xeon 5300 quad-core processors, which are expected to be announced early Monday next week. The company claims that the new x models will deliver "three to four times performance of systems that IBM offered less than twelve months ago."

IBM will offer Xeon 5300 CPUs with Clovertown core in two-socket rack servers (x3650, x3550), two-socket tower servers (x3500, x3400) and its blade server BladeCenter HS21. Pricing starts a $2370 for the rack servers, $1840 for the tower servers and $3050 for the blade version. All new servers are squarely aimed at similarly equipped models announced by Dell.

IBM also announced new technologies for its System Cluster 1350, which targets supercomputing applications. The new generation can scale up to 1024 processors and achieve a performance of "more than 20.4 TFlops." The cluster system can house a hybrid-processor environment which can be built with AMD Opteron-based x3455, x3655, x3755 and BladeCenter systems, Intel Xeon-based x3550, x3650 and BladeCenter servers, as well as IBM's own Power-based p5 and Cell processors.

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