Staying ahead of Moore's Law has driven chip makers to focus more on increasing cores -- and less on transistors -- when deciding how die real estate should be landscaped. So too has been the trend in servers, with socket and core counts steadily on the rise.

Beyond scores of cores, there have been other interesting innovations in servers in the first half of this year ranging from super-dense bladed systems to one that's akin to a smartphone. Here's a look at 10 of the coolest servers of 2012 so far.