Revisiting the early days of blade servers, Hewlett-Packard will use Intel's Pentium M processor, designed for mobile computers, in a new slim server expected early in the third quarter.

HP will upgrade its ProLiant BL10e blade server with a 1GHz Pentium M, a processor code-named "Banias" that should boost performance over the current 900MHz ultra-low-voltage Pentium III used in the current product, Sally Stevens, director of blade servers for HP's Industry Standard Server group, said in an interview. The Pentium M comes with 1MB of high-speed cache memory rather than the 512KB in the Pentium III and supports faster double data rate (DDR) memory.

"There's a nice opportunity for enhanced performance," Stevens said.

Keeping momentum in the Intel server market is crucial for HP, which acquired Compaq Computer in 2002, in part for the ProLiant line. HP had the biggest fraction of the $16.4 billion market for servers using Intel or Intel-compatible processors in 2002, but IBM and Dell Computer are gaining, and even Intel-phobic Sun Microsystems has entered the fray with its own Intel servers.

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