As Sun Microsystems Inc ups the ante in the high end workstation market, Hewlett-Packard Co is raising its own technical compute bar with new Power Desktop C-Class workstations and Enterprise Parallel Server clustering for its K-Class servers. Both lines use the PA-7200 RISC. At 167 SPECint92, 269 SPECfp92 and 4.4 SPECint_base95, 7.45 SPECfp_base95, the new Model C110 is from $25,700 with 32Mb RAM and 1Gb disk. The addition of a Visualize-48 three-dimensional graphics subsystem raises the price to $44,500 – $16,000 more than Sun’s 170E Creator – though it performs 236 PLBsurf93 against the Sun unit’s 185 PLBsurf93. Hewlett-Packard claims that the C110 outguns Silicon Graphics Inc’s Power Indigo2/Maximum Impact by 70% on three-dimensional graphics, at $15,500 less cost. The C100, with a 100MHz CPU, is $19,700 with 32Mb RAM and 1Gb disk. With Visualize-24 graphics rated at 200 PLBsurf93, the price rises to $29,500. The C-Class systems – which run HP-UX 9.05, 9.07 (for Visualize support) or 10.0 – obsolete the Model 735/125, and come in below the symmetric multiprocessing J-Class. They don’t include MPEG-2 decompression and multimedia functions a la UltraSparc, though Hewlett says that both the PA-7300LC and PA-8000 to be used in new low- and high-end systems have it all.
HEWLETT TWEAKS HIGH-END UNIPROCESSOR DESKTOPS
