Yesterday ServicesANGLE editor Alex Williams covered Intel’s new Xeon E5 chips and more importantly the specs: a 80 percent speed improvement and built-in I/O functionality with support for the latest PCI Express standard. It also features a number of other tweaks such as hardware based data encryption and decryption.

E5 is most definitely not sharing the faith of Itanium, a product that has been deemed by the industry as a strategic failure (and eventually led to a good deal of courtroom drama between Oracle and HP).  Dell’s latest server line and Hewlett-Packard’s talked-about ProLiant Gen8 both run the new chips, alongside the newest member of the club.

The Verge reports that HP’s Z family of high performance workstations have been upgraded from end to end. The Z420, which is designed to handle relatively mild workloads, offers up to 8 Intel Xeon E5-1600/E5-2600 series cores, 4GB of memory and 11TB of storage. The Z620 in turn packs up to 16 cores, 96GB of error correcting code memory and the same amount of storage, while the high-end Z820 features 16 dual socket processor cores, 512GB ECC memory and 15TB worth of storage. All of these machines run on the latest addition to the Sandy Bridge family, and are powered by different Nvidia Quadro graphic cards.

“While it’s not uncommon for a high-end workstation to be able to hold over 100GB of RAM, we haven’t yet seen a mainstream enterprise workstation with this much power. Given that this is just one machine, it’s probably going to be a while before we start seeing these in professional use, but it’s a sign of where high-end computing might be headed.”

Even in light of this launch and others similar to it, PC makers have shifted their focus away from the client business in search of more lucrative markets. Both HP and Dell have reported poor performance in their latest fiscal quarter, which was accounted to, among other things, the unstable PC industry. Both consumers and workers are adopting mobile devices and are starting to move beyond the desktop, especially in a time when the cloud acts as a catalyst for this trend.

HP is expanding this direction as well. Swisscom is using the HP CloudSystem private cloud infrastructure to power its newly launched hosted unified communications and collaboration service, and today we had an update from the Netherlands.  Centric and Eshgro are the first HP CloudAgile-certified partners in the nation as of this morning.