by , 1:30 PM EDT, August 7th, 2006

Apple announced the Intel-based replacement for the Xserve during Steve Jobs' World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) keynote presentation on Monday. The redesigned server includes two Intel Dual-Core Xeon 64-bit processors running at speeds up to 3.0GHz, up to 2.25TB of storage, and redundant power supplies. Apple claims the new Xserve is 5 times faster than the Xserve G5 it replaces. The new Xserve still takes up 1U of server rack space.

The Dual-Core Xeon processors in the new Xserve are available in 2.0, 2.66, or 3.0GHz speeds. The machine also supports up to 32GB of 667MHz DDR ECC fully buffered RAM, up to thee 3Gb/s SATA or SAS hot-swappable drives, and includes two eight-lane PCI Express expansion slots, an ATI Radeon X1300 PCI Express video card with 256 MB RAM, and Mac OS X 10.4 Server with unlimited clients.

The rack-mount server is priced starting at US$2,999 - which includes two 2.0GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors, 1GB RAM, an 80GB SATA hard drive, dual Gigabit Ethernet, three FireWire 800 and two USB 2.0 ports, and Mac OS X Tiger Server - for $300 less than Dell's similarly equipped server.

With the announcement of the new Xserve, Apple has officially completed its transition away from PowerPC processors to Intel chips well before the promised 2007 deadline.

The new Intel-based Xserve will be available in October.

[This article has been updated with additional information about the Intel-based Xserve]