A host of new hardware products are on tap as LinuxWorld Expo 2005 kicks off in San Francisco this week. Among the wares are blade servers for enterprise data centers, high-speed network adapters and TCP/IP offload gear for stand-alone Linux servers or Linux cluster nodes, as well as embedded Linux operating systems wares for real-time application deployments.

Penguin Computing will launch its BladeRunner 4130 and 4140 blade server products for Linux, featuring AMD and Intel 64-bit processors, respectively. Linux server blade can support single or dual processors. The AMD-based 4130 supports single- and dual-core chips, while the Intel Xeon blade supports Intel's Extended Memory 64 Technology, allowing 64-bit processors to use memory more efficiently. Both BladeRunner server blades can come pre-configured with various Linux distributions. Up to 12 BladeRunner blades can fit into Penguin's BladeRunner chassis, with support for Scyld Beowulf Linux clustering software built in.

For fast Linux server connectivity, LeWiz Communications will be debuting mutli-Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet NICs for Linux servers at the show. The Magic2028-4p card includes four Gigabit Ethernet ports, and includes hardware-based TCP/IP processing offload features, allowing Linux servers to work harder processing applications workloads instead of the network software stack. A 10G Ethernet NIC is also available, with the Magic2028-10G, with both fiber and CX-4 copper interfaces, as well as TCP/IP offload hardware built onto the NIC. LeWiz currently has 32-bit Linux drivers available for the each NIC, with 64-bit drivers due later this year.

For embedded Linux engineers, FreeScale Semiconductor will be showing off embedded Linux products aimed at home and mobile users. A digital home entertainment product, based on PowerPC chips and embedded Linux software will be on display, as well an embedded Linux media player aimed at the mobile device market (if you've ever wondered where those MP3 players in cell phones come from). The company will also launch its CodeWarrior suite of tools for compile and develop embedded Linux code for PowerPC architectures.