High density computing can also mean high energy efficiency, SuperMicro claimed as it announced SuperBlade, a bladeserver capable of supporting up to 40 processors in a 7U-high box.

Each chassis can have up to four power supplies for redundancy, which are over 90 per cent efficient, SuperMicro marketing veep Don Clegg said.

He added that there's two sizes of power supply available, so the system can be customised to have the right amount of shared power for its application load and processor types.

SuperBlade's 10 blades are available with two or four processors each, and can support quad or dual-core AMD or Intel chips. Each blade has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, eight DIMM slots for memory, two slots for optional hot-plug SAS or SATA hard drives, and a socket for an optional Infiniband module.

The blades slot into a midplane in the chassis, which also hosts a Gigabit Ethernet switch, duplicated for redundancy, and a server management module. It can have an Infiniband switch for server clustering as well.

SuperBlade pricing has not yet been set, but Clegg claimed it will be "competitive". He added that while bladeservers do require "a certain level of sophistication" in their users, there is now plenty of open software that can make full use of this type of system, especially in areas such as enterprise server consolidation and data centre computing. ®