IBM as the "king of the hill" on the server market is now officially announcing a new chipset architecture, named X4, for high performance x86 compatible server systems, just in time to be integrated alongside the new Intel platform for multiprocessor systems. The X4 architecture will be used on IBM servers that integrate the Intel quad core Tigerton family of central processing units.

Intel's own platform for multiprocessor server systems consists of the 7300 series of processors and the 7300 series of chipsets, also known as "Clarksboro" chipsets, but IBM has other plans as it will use its own X4 chipset architecture on servers from the System x product line which are using the Intel aforementioned processors. The X4 architecture is seen as a continuation of the X3 line of chipsets which was first launched in 2005 and it is designed to bring mainframe and supercomputer abilities to the IBM line of x86 compatible servers which are less powerful in terms of raw computing power and efficiency.

The Intel Caneland platform is specially designed for use in multiprocessor environments and it marks the total conversion to the Core microarchitecture. This new platform is expected to successfully compete against advanced Micro Devices' new quad-core Opteron processors, codenamed Barcelona. According to the news site extremetech citing Jay Bretzmann, an IBM product marketing manager, the big blue company has other plans for the Intel 7300 series of central processing units as its own X4 chipset architecture will help with virtualization tasks while enabling IBM to built an off the shelf server system that can outperform similarly intended solutions from competing companies. "It allows us to scale up and offer some unique capabilities, especially when our customers are running large database applications, such as Oracle and SAP, as well as additional options when consider server consolidation projects," Bretzmann said.

As a part of the new X4 chipset architecture IBM included the x3950 M2 chip as well as a platform which offers support for 32 Registered DIMM memory modules slots which can each house up to 8GB of random access memory, so a total of 256GB of RAM will be available for each server system. The new server system should be able to handle up to 800 virtual machines of a hardware platform of four processors thanks to an embedded 4GB USB key that will contain a hypervisor, the software necessary for virtualization. Apart from the virtualization capabilities, IBM arranged the new x86 servers in a chassis that can support up to four systems for a total of 16 processors and a total of 64 processing cores. The new servers will also feature four 2.5 inch SAS hard disk drives in order to offer a maximum storage capacity of 584GB and on the expansion slots department the system will offer a total of seven PCI Express slots as well as rear hot rear swappable power supplies.