xserve G4, G5, intel xeon

The xserve G4 marked apple's first major push into the server market since its ill-fated network servers. While apple had sold server versions of various power macs, the xserve was the first apple machine specifically designed for the server market in years. 

The most remarkable feature of the xserve was its rackmount case. The xserve case was a remarkable feat of engineering. The four drive bays were accessible via the front panel, as was one of the firewire ports, and the CD-ROM drive. Multicolored display lights on the front panel showed drive access, processor load, and ethernet link status. 

The xserve G5 brought the architectural improvements of the powermac G5 to the xserve line. In addition to adding single or dual 2.0 GHz PowerPC 970FX processors, the xserve G5 included dramatically faster data and memory buses, more and faster RAM, FireWire 800 and USB 2.0, Serial ATA and PCI-X support.

The xserve intel xeon was built around two dual-core Intel Xeon 5100 processors, completing apple's transition to Intel.