Apple’s Mac mini server gets rid of an optical drive and gains room for two hard disks. It uses Snow Leopard Server, and has the same 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo processor as the updated 320GB Mac mini.

For $1000 it includes two 500GB hard disks, 4GB of RAM, and GeForce 9400M graphics. The 320GB Mac mini will stay at $800, but has the already mentioned new processor, and ups 2GB of memory to 4GB. The $600 entry-level Mac mini has a faster 2.26GHz processor (was 2GHz), 2GB RAM (was 1GB), and has 160GB of storage (was 120GB).

As promised back in September, AMD announced on Thursday that it has started shipping its new Phenom processors with triple cores. These processors are the first on the market that use 3 cores on a single silicon die instead of the more traditional 2 or 4 core chips.

The design of the Phenom X3 8400 (2.1GHz) and Phenom X3 8600 (2.3GHZ) chips are essential the same as AMD’s quad cores with one of the cores removed. This configuration allows for new pricing of the chips in between dual cores and quad cores, where rival Intel does not currently have a competitive product.

Today Intel announced plans for its future in building processor chips in this seemingly crazy race to build them bigger and faster between Intel and AMD. The latest news involves new chips that promise to bump up processing speeds even more with 2, 4, 6 and even 8-core processors.

Intel unveiled a new microprocessor code-named “Dunnington” which will pack in a 6-core processor as a replacement for current Xeon systems with Quad-core processors. According to Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel’s digital enterprise group, the new Dunnington processors are expected to be available in the second half of 2008.

Intel made an announcement on Sunday that they’ve decided to give a new family of small processor chips the official name “Atom”. The Atom family of processors will be low-power chips targeting mobile devices that access the internet as well as lower-end, “Internet-centric” mobile computers. The first two chips to be branded with the Atom were previously code-named Silverthorne and Diamondville.

Both of these chips are expected to hit the market early yet this year. Intel’s Sliverthorne chip is designed to run in mobile Internet devices and uses very low amounts of power, even shutting down between processing tasks to further conserve power. The Diamondville chip is a more affordable single processing core chip created for low-end notebook computers.

Hot on the heals of the Barcelona Quad Core processor introduction last week, AMD today confirmed rumors and unveiled a new triple core addition to the Phenom lineup of dual-core and quad-core processors. The new triple core Phenom (code named “Toliman”) will be added in the first quarter of 2008 and will likely take its place in a new pricing tier between the dual and quad cores.

AMD says the new CPU’s will be the first ever to offer 3 cores on a single silicon die, even though the makeup of the new triple core will be essential the same as that of the quad-core, with one of the cores removed. The 3-core CPU’s will allow AMD to provide more purchasing options for consumers while still introducing multi-core technology into more computer purchases without requiring consumers to buy into the full quad-core price.