Hewlett-Packard Co officials were in London yesterday to talk about plans for its server and workstation lines. They were keen to stress that talk of the death of its PA RISC range was exaggerated. Indeed, Barry Crume, product marketing manager workstation systems division, claimed that the continuing development of dual processor architectures – Intel’s IA-64 range and the PA RISC line – was not only possible for a company of HP’s size but also necessary. HP has already said that it thinks that Merced – the first of the IA-64 EPIC dynasty – will be unsuited to the requirements of the majority of its workstation customers (CI No 3,551). Now the company line is that PA RISC will still outperform Merced in terms of application benchmarks and price/performance comparisons. Crume’s take is that Merced is a great development platform for companies to re-architecture their software long-term but he is not expecting that companies to make the transition to IA-64 overnight with the advent of Merced. HP says that it is still not sure the if IA-64 McKinley chip that it co-developed with Intel will outperform the equivalent PA-RISC chip for certain applications. Merced is expected next year, McKinley in 2001. However, HP is unsure when the PA-RISC line will phased out in favor of the IA-64 architecture, sometime well towards the end of 2003 is as far as HP would stick its neck out. Meanwhile, Crume was very ready to give his response to questions on arch-high-end rival Silicon Graphic Inc’s entry into the NT workstation market where HP is so dominant. He claimed that the proprietary aspects of the design – hardware on the chipset that requires a separate BIOS, the graphics chip – would trip SGI up. Crume claimed that SGI needed to do something more standard than that for its entry into the NT arena. For its part, HP has tweaked its NT range, launching an HP workstation using a fx4 graphics card running on Xeon CPUs – a box aimed at the higher end of the NT market. As for the International Data Corp report that HP trotted out, claiming a lead in the NT workstation market in 1998, Crume admitted that there may be a gray area between high-end PCs and workstations which affected the figures. Anytime an industry is new, it’s a little bit difficult to do the counting, he said.
