Hewlett-Packard Co has weighed in with its Intel Xeon-based workstation offerings. On Monday, HP will introduce two boxes based on the chip – new versions of the Kayak XU workstation and the Kayak XW. The new XU is designed to be the world’s fastest machine for 2-D and entry-level 3-D graphics applications. It features up to two Xeon processors, 128Mb SDRAM and 4.5Gb hard disk drives, and will be available in August starting at $5,000. The Xeon-based XW is being billed as the world’s fastest 3-D graphics machine for Windows NT and contains HP Visualize Fx6 graphics accelerator, something the company said has previously only been available for Unix workstations. The Fx6 is said to be anywhere from 35%-100% faster than the Fx4, the company’s previous fastest accelerator for workstations. The XW also supports up to two Xeons and contains Intel’s 100MHz front-side bus and the new Intel AGP chipset. It will go for $12,000 when it hits the market in October. HP said it was largely, if not solely, responsible for influencing Intel to position the Xeon for workstations, as the chip maker had envisioned it mainly for servers. It said the modification work on the existing models it leveraged for the new offerings began about seven or eight months ago. The addition of the new boxes rounds out HP’s Kayak line, which also includes the Kayak XA, an entry-level workstation with Intel’s LX chipset and the Kayak XA-S, a mainstream model introduced on June 1. HP stressed that the new products are aimed squarely at the top of the pyramid and should allow it to maintain its [graphics workstation] lead for the foreseeable future…about six months or so. HP promises more Xeon-related product announcements in the near future, as Intel introduces faster versions of the chip.
