Hewlett-Packard Co will today announce the first desktop deployment of its 64-bit HP-UX 11.0. It has been available on the company’s K, T, V and EPS servers for a few months and the company is claiming that this is the first availability, although it will not actually ship on the company’s Visualize workstations until August, which is roughly when HP-UX 11.0 was supposed to arrive on the desktop. The Visualize workstations are aimed at the electronic design automation (EDA) market, where HP will go head-to-head with Sun Microsystems Inc. HP’s other main workstation rival, Silicon Graphics Inc is the focus of the other part of today’s announcement. HP is piling trade-in deals for SGI machines on top of the price cuts it made on its Visualize workstation running fx graphics in April. The company is also unveiling a plug-in graphics enhancement, which adds increased OpenGL graphics performance and new 3D graphics functionality as well as making them fully Y2K- compliant. The plug-in pack turns on various functions that are built in but until now latent, including higher screen resolution support, up to 1600 X 1200, from 1280 X1024 at the moment. Having cranked the performance of the fx graphics, HP claims for its C240 workstations up to two and a half times that of SGI’s Octane 250 MXE boxes. It’s new power-down SGI rebate program, which comes on top of any other reductions, offers current SGI customers $2,000 back for purchasing a C200 workstation with fx4 graphics, or $2,500 for buying a C240 with fx4 or fx6 graphics.
