Only days before the launch of Advanced Micro Devices' first dual-core Opteron microprocessor, HP began taking orders for a four-processor blade system that will use the chips.

HP's new system, the ProLiant BL45p, will ship with a 2-GHz dual-core processor called the Opteron 875, according to HP's Web site. HP plans to announce the BL45p this week, with shipments beginning 20 to 30 days after the announcement, a company spokeswoman confirmed.

AMD and chip rival Intel have been racing to be first to ship processors with two computational engines, called cores, on a single processor. AMD is expected to launch its processors at an April 21 event in New York.

The new HP blade is based on a similar design to HP's four-way Xeon, the BL40p, but with AMD's dual-core processors, it is the first blade server from a major vendor to have so many processing engines. The dual-core Opterons are designed to use the same amount of power as their single-core predecessors, and AMD has had to reduce the clock speed of the processors to 2GHz to add the second processing engine without driving up the chip's power requirements. AMD's single-core Opterons have a maximum clock speed of 2.6 GHz.

With the launch of the BL45p, HP's Opteron blade line will be as broad as its Xeon offerings. By year-end, the company intends to also begin shipping its first blade system based on Intel's Itanium 2 processor, company officials have said. Analysts say that this third line of blade products likely will be based on Intel's upcoming dual-core Itanium processor, code-named Montecito.

Blades have emerged as an alternative to rack-mounted servers in recent years. Smaller than rack servers, they slide side-by-side into a special chassis, which lets them share resources such as network cables, power and cooling. Though the market initially was slow to adopt blades, they have become more popular of late. Gartner estimates that about 290,000 blades were shipped in 2004. It expects that number to nearly double in 2005.

HP is going through the process of making all of its server products available in this new form, says John Enck, a Gartner analyst. "They're simply trying to duplicate . . . all their servers in the blade environment," he says. "They're the only one of the vendors that is supporting Xeon and Opteron."

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