HP: Trim the Fat with Efficeon Blades

With the summer time fast approaching, HP is suggesting its customers try to shed some excess IT weight and slip into something a bit more thinning. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company Monday added a batch of new blade servers based on the Transmeta TM8000 or Efficeon processor. The update marks HP as the only vendor to offer x86 architectures from three different chip manufacturers: Intel and AMD and Transmeta. The new offerings are a part of HP's Consolidated Client Infrastructure (CCI) hardware and software pairings. Originally unveiled in December, the goal is to offer customers a cheaper alternative to racks of pizza box servers and instead use "virtualization" software and low-power hardware in concert. The HP Blade PC bc1000 features a 1.0 GHz Efficeon processor, 40-gigabyte ultra ATA/100 hard drive and up to 1,024 megabytes of double data rate SDRAM. The new blade is ready in North America for $820 per blade and should ship around the world later this year. HP is also offering a customized package made up of HP's new blade PCs, Compaq thin clients, and network storage complete with installation, training and a support contract starting at just under $1,399 per seat.