Apple will now not ship dual-CPU Xserve G5 servers until April, two months later than the company originally promised, it admitted this week.

However, the Mac maker has now begun shipping the 1U rack-mount server's single-processor version.

Both versions were launch early last January with availability pegged for some time in February. IBM was due to launch the 90nm version of the PowerPC 970 - the chip Apple calls the G5 - during that month, so presumably server shipments were set to follow the launch.

Yet after the PowerPC 970FX was formally unveiled, Xserve G5s continued to be available for pre-order only.

The first machines to roll off the production line may well have found their way to Virginia Tech, which is replacing its 1100-node dual-2GHz Power Mac G5 cluster, System X, with an equivalent number of Xserve G5 dualies. System X is Apple's showcase G5 cluster.

Apple this week said that the US Centre for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behaviour at Princeton University had also decided to build an dualie Xserve G5-based cluster, this time a 64-node job. The G5-based rig was selected over a similar configuration of AMD-based boxes, Jonathan Cohen, the Centre's director, said in a statement.

Alongside that announcement, Apple launched Apple Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics, which it claims requires "little or no IT support". It includes iNquiry, The BioTeam's bioinformatics package, which provides 200 ready-to-use bioinformatics applications optimised the Xserve G5. ®