The maker of expensive printer ink, HP has announced a new line of Integrity and Superdome servers based on the Itanium processor. While there is not much new in the announcement just quad-core, 65-nanometer Itanium 9300 goodness, HP also said that the Superdome, which is HP's highest-performing line of Itanium-based machines would be sold as blade servers.

Previously the beasts have been tower configurations, but HP wants to create Superdome blades will be able to plug into a blade chassis, allowing for a common infrastructure that fits into standard racks. They will not be seen until the second half of the year and HP has not released prices for the product. It will come in an 18U c7000 enclosure, which is 8U bigger than the standard c7000 chassis, and has the capacity for eight two-socket blades, which equates to 64 Itanium processing cores.

HP claims that the extra space will mean it can shove more capabilities than a typical x86 or Integrity blade. It is muttering about things like Crossbar Fabric, a reliability feature that aids the routing of data between blades and I/O.