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HP puts bets on Intel Itanium 2-based servers
2002-10-30 / Taiwan News, Staff Reporter / By Marie Feliciano
Technical Consulting Manager of Hewlett Packard Eric Nelson smiles as he poses with the names of companies who are solution partners with HP's new Itanium 2 processor. The new processor, co-developed with Intel, is designed for high-end applications. (Peter Mah, Taiwan News)
Hewlett-Packard yesterday said it was pushing the technology envelope in high-performance computing space with its Intel Itanium 2-powered workstations.
The Palo Alto, California-based computer giant was hoping to nab customers away from rivals Sun Microsystems and IBM, HP product manager Victor Chen told the Taiwan News.
"We have proven that we can outperform IBM and Sun with our workstations," Chen said.
HP was a core developer of Intel's second-generation 64-bit Itanium processor, Itanium 2. Its product line ranged from the zx2000 workstation equipped with a single 64-bit processor - priced at roughly NT$188,000, to the zx6000, which has one or two 900MHz or 1GHz processors. The latter is priced at NT$332,000, said Chen.
HP hoped its value proposition was enough to lure Taiwan's IC designers and high-end computing geeks away from Sun and IBM to HP, Chen said.
"Computer-aided engineering, where tons of data and tests are done, is our top market," he said. "We expect our product to make a dent in the market since these users are very aggressive when it comes to adapting new technologies. Besides, HP is the only vendor to provide graphics on Itanium 2."
Performance, not price, was the yardstick used by HP's target customers in determining their systems, Chen added.
Another juicy come-on, he noted, was that HP was the only company to support Itanium 2 for Unix, Windows and Linux.
"We always have our customers' changing needs in mind," said Chen. "Our commitment to the architecture is long-term. In fact, we believe that the demand for 64-bit processors will only increase since future applications will be requiring a lot more juice."
HP was the first vendor to ship Intel Itanium 2-based workstations and servers.
The other products in the HP arsenal included the rx2600 dual-processor server powered with 900MHz or 1GHz processors and up to 12G bytes of memory, and the HP Server rx5670 that had up to four 900MHz or 1GHz processors and with 48G bytes of memory. |
