By William Fellows
Hewlett-Packard Co will next week announce its first native PA- 8500 RISC systems. The long-anticipated V2500 server with up to 32 PA-8500s gets its first public outing on Tuesday, while the workstations group will try to pinch some of the glory by announcing its own system a day earlier. The V2500 doubles V- class performance to 100,000 TPC-Cs in a single system and will ship in volume in HP’s second financial quarter which ends in April. A Unix workstation will debut as the uniprocessor C360 which uses a 367MHz part and supersedes the C240 which will be taken off the price list in Spring. HP claims that when configured with fx4 Visualize graphics the C360 runs MCAD and EDA applications up to 90% faster than Sun Microsystems Inc’s Ultra60 with Elite3Dm6 graphics. It performs 26 SPECint95 and 28.1 SPECfp95 with 1.5Mb on-chip cache and runs HP-UX 10.20 workstation release or HP-UX 11.0. In fact the floating-point performance is less than the 30.1 SPECfp95 achieved by IBM Corp’s new Power3 AIX workstations, though it far outpaces IBM on integer performance. The 0.25 micron PA-8500 will also be available as a board upgrade for some models from next year. In time it will replace all existing models with PA-8500 devices. HP now has two low-end B-Class Unix workstations, three C-Class models and the high-end J-Class. The next-generation K-Class server, dubbed Prelude (CI No 3,474) which will reportedly to use the Stretch system bus that can also support Merced, is due to be announced around April. Merrill Lynch & Co notes K-Class sales account for 60% of HP’s Unix server sales. V-Class and D-Class have around 20% each. It expects discounting ahead of the new K- Class will affect the company’s earnings in this market.
