For the past decade or more, the trend in servers has been pretty clear: moving away from "big iron" and proprietary servers towards machines built on standard x86 chips. In recent years, both Intel and AMD have responded with chips designed for servers that add more and more cores and functionality, providing much better price performance than everything that came before.
But we're now starting to see some very different approaches to servers, both with more specialized products based on GPUs, and with those based on low-end, rather than high-end, CPUs.
In the mainstream market, Intel has been pushing its Xeon 5600 family (known as Westmere-EP) with four- and six-core (eight- and 12-thread) variants as its mainstream offering, with its Xeon 7500 series (aka Nehalem-EX) offering eight-cores and 16-threads for multi-socket servers. The company is now expected to start talking about a 10-core, 20-thread version at the Hot Chips conference in August. LINK