Making good on their promise to offer chips that aren't quite so obscenely power hungry as Prescott and Prescott based chips, Intel is releasing the dual-core "Xeon LV". Operating at 1.6Ghz or 2.0GHz ($209 and $423 respectively), it consumes a mere 31 watts, an almost incredible six-fold reduction compared to other Xeons. Intel is obviously wanting to make a stab back at AMD, though for a Xeon you'd really expect the clock speed to be significantly higher, and to at least support 64-bit, but it doesn't. It's a start, however, but some are reluctant to test those waters:
However, the 32-bit design is one reason the top seller of x86 servers, Hewlett-Packard, decided not to build any machines using the first-generation Xeon LV. IBM concluded otherwise and includes the chip in a blade server that fits into its BladeCenter chassis. And HP is building some special-purpose machines for the telecommunications market using the Xeon LV.
As early as 3Q 2006, a successor will appear with the latent 64-bit enabled again, and perhaps higher clock speeds.