I heard an interesting snippet the other day about IBM's plans to target the high performance computing needs of Wall St. and the City with blade servers based on its powerful Cell processor.

IBM developed the processor with Toshiba and Sony. It is the brains of Sony's PlayStation 3 videogame console, but also has potential applications in industrial servers - particularly in a dense blade configuration that caters to current demand for hardware with lower power, cooling and space requirements.

IBM has been touting the Cell blades for a while now and finally brought them to market late last year, but because of its contracts with game console manufacturers (IBM also makes the chips inside Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360 consoles) taking priority, it has apparently been unable to ramp up server production to sell to its key industry segments, including financial services.

Maybe it's just me - but I quite like the idea that the needs of the video game fans are taking priority over those of investment bank data centre managers' , despite the latter's IT budgets.

That is, of course, assuming that there is a demand for these Cell blades, and that high-performance, low-power processing requirements aren't already being sufficiently met by the likes of Intel, and those who build their servers on its processors.