IBM sees room for further consolidation. Today, a user can be mapped only to the virtual machines that reside on a single blade. By the third quarter, users will be able to connect to virtual machines running on any blade in a chassis. Beyond that, IBM envisions pooling resources in a "gridlike manner," says Juhi Jotwani, director of solutions and alliances for the xSeries and BladeCenter. "Users will still have the personalization, but resources will be spread across the entire chassis," he says.

Ultimately, the PC session itself may be broken apart and processed in parallel on one or more blades. This will evolve naturally as computers move first toward dual-core and then to multi-core processors, and as software developers begin to optimize for the new processor architectures by allowing more and more operations to execute in parallel.

Windows sessions that can leverage a PC blade grid may be a ways off, but opportunities to leverage PC blades for grid computing aren't. Some IT organizations are already using desktops after hours for grid computing tasks. Not only will PC blades in neatly aligned racks in a data center be much easier to set up and manage as a grid, but the design also presents opportunities to speed I/O between PC blades to improve performance.

While using BladeCenter server blades today might sound like overkill for PCs, that's likely to change if blade designs adapt to general-purpose use. As servers and PCs are abstracted from underlying hardware through virtualization, the distinction between what constitutes a PC blade and a server blade will fade. "Blade PCs are going to blur the definition of servers," says Tad Bodeman, director of blade PC and thin-client solutions at HP.

Ultimately, blade PCs will simply appear as instances on one or more virtual machines that get assigned to segments of a general compute-resource pool. The thing the user thinks of today as the PC will simply be absorbed into it.