Apple Computer announced a new Intel based server at the World Wide Developers Conference on Monday.

In San Francisco's Moscone center, the company said the new Xserve branded server will feature four 64-bit Intel Xeon processors featuring the Mac OS X Server Tiger operating system. Enterprises and customers should expect to see a five fold increase in performance, the company said.

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, Apple touted.

Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, said the server has been great for serving Mac workgroups in the past, and now with newly design Intel processors and matching architecture, no one can offer better price performance and manageability in a 1U server.

The new Xeon's are based off of Intel's new Core Architecture, released to vendors and OEM's in the final week of June, this year.

The Intel-based Xserve will be the first system to ship with a preinstalled unlimited client edition of Tiger Server software that is optimized to run on Intel-based systems. The new Xserve is scheduled to be available in October 2006 through the Apple Store and Apple Authorized Resellers at a suggested retail price of $2,999 for a base configuration.

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