"I don't have 200 CPUs that can go bad, [or] 400 sticks of RAM," Sexton said. "I only have nine servers."

But Roger Neal, IT director at Duncan Regional Hospital in Duncan, Okla., advocates the use of blade PCs. He has installed blade devices developed by ClearCube Technology Inc. to support more than 220 end users.

Blade PCs "are going to continue to grow [in performance and functionality] as fast as the normal desktop, and I think that is a little bit of an advantage" over server-based thin clients, Neal said. Blades also require less-specialized skills within IT than server-based thin clients, which may need employees with Citrix training, he added.

HP's Athlon-based blades will support one user per device and provide a standard corporate desktop image that's indistinguishable from what users would get on a desktop PC, said Tad Bodeman, director of client consolidation solutions at HP's personal systems group.

One of the reasons HP went with the Transmeta chip was its relatively low power use, with each blade using about 25 watts, but HP says the AMD chip is similar.