G5 Xserve - Good Audio Potential? Options

[Tree Leopard]

G5 Xserve was recently released ...
http://www.apple.com/xserve/

1U, 19in rack mount unit, with multi-platform compatibility (mac / win / unix) with a lot of power. Bascially, a very attractive proposition, especially for hi-rez recording and DVD post.

From reports the unit is selling very well. (Sure, its price and features are aimed at medium to large enterprise.)
http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/01/04/xs...serve/index.php

For the realists: if you had one of these in yor studio, how would you - given your particular config. and work processes - make use of it? I'm very curious about how people would take advatange of its features.
http://www.apple.com/xserve/specs.html

For the dreamers: ...do you visualize something that is a like half-step between the Mac Mini and Xserve, an upgradable 1U media server / external processor hub that keeps older model G4s in action (i.e. rather than buying a whole new computer to get the power) and is mobile and robust enough for "out of house" production projects...?

What are your thoughts?

[swilder]

Distributed processing works well for the scientific community because there's no need to observe the results in real time.

Distributed processing in the recording studio is a different monster because of our need to listen in real time. The big bottleneck being the ethernet connection.

So nowadays we're mostly using 100 Megabits per second. Most of you probably know that on an ethernet, all computer have simultaneous access to the network. That means that the more computers you have on the network, the more "chatter" is going to occur. Ethernets typically are pretty stable up to about 25% of its capacity. Above that; the collisions in data packets start creating errors and drops in data.

Collisions and errors result in audio problems and latency.

I am very interested in seeing a review that publishes real numbers on performance and latency of the node technology.

Scott