PowerPC 970s in IBM's New Blades

As first reported by ThinkSecret, IBM has released information on its new PowerPC 970 / Linux based BladeCenter JS20 Servers.

The upcoming JS20 Blade servers offer a high density server option allowing up to 14 hot-swap JS20 blades within 7U of rackspace. Each blade is equipped with two 1.6GHz PowerPC 970 processors for a total of 28 PowerPC 970s in the same 7U space.

According to TheRegister the system will not be available until late Q1 of 2004 and will be priced at $2699. eWeek had previously reported that IBM would be using the 970 in their low-end servers and anticipated an updated 970 by mid 2004.

Apple is still expected to update their 1U server offering (Xserve) to a G5 processor.