The single-socket server space has been a niche part of the server space, just as machines with more than four sockets has never been a particularly high volume part of the market. The advent of multicore processors and faster system and memory buses have made single-socket servers more appealing to a certain class of customers.
A whitebox server maker called Visionman Computers now hopes it can carve out a new niche for itself, selling single-socket servers based on the desktop variant of Intel’s family of processors codenamed Nehalem. The “real” server variants of the Nehalem family of chips, which are expected to be branded with the Xeon moniker and designed for two-socket servers, are due at the end of the first quarter and expected to span from four- to eight-processor cores.
