IBM announced its HC10 PC blade for the BladeCenter chassis in early May with general availability in Q3 2007. Working in conjunction with Devon IT, Inc., a provider of thin-client terminals, IBM will offer a processor blade that provides high-end computing power for the workstation. This processor blade is designed to support a single user with advanced graphics and connect over the existing enterprise network.

Location, Location, Location

By placing the processing power in the data center, a “thin” terminal on the desk and connecting the two over the enterprise LAN, the IT department can better control workstation resources with the processor residing in the data center. Ideally this would lead to reduced cost for the enterprise and higher reliability for the end user.
In order to increase performance over the LAN (and potentially, WAN) connections, graphics acceleration hardware is included on the new blade. This hardware compresses the graphics data before transmission over the network. The Devon IT thin-client terminal provides the data decompression and display capabilities at the user location. Using compression to transport higher resolution signals should provide a higher quality display on the remote terminal.

IBM has stated that this processor blade will have the XP-logo, indicating support for Microsoft Windows XP. By supporting the most widely used OS available, a wide variety of applications can be simultaneously supported for each user.