On the Blade Network web site (note the .net address or you wind up on a site about hand-crafted knives) the company illustrates a rack with two Intel Xeon quad core blade servers with other components for high speed messaging and switches.

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With its 95% share of the world market for gallium arsenide semiconductors, Japan makes the brains for high-speed fiber-optic telecommunication switches as well as the chips that steer Tomahawk missiles.

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They can thus be found inside network routers, telecoms switches, mobile-phone base stations and many other devices that need both the processing speed of specialist hardware and the ability to respond to changing standards.

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