Kash - Here are some new Xeon sales for Intel!
The high priced Xeon Sales are starting up!
Paul
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HP Prepares Xeon-Based Kayak Workstations
by Andy Patrizio, TechWeb
July 08, 1998 (05:00 P.M.)
techweb.com
On Monday, Hewlett-Packard will introduce a pair of additions to its Kayak family of high-end Windows NT workstations with Intel's new Pentium II Xeon chip.
But the real star of these systems could be the video board.
The new Kayaks are part of the XU and XW line of workstations specializing in 2-D and 3-D graphics modeling. They will come with a new video board, the HP Visualize fx6. The Accelerated Graphics Port board comes with six parallel geometry accelerators based on floating point technology in the company's precision architecture-RISC chips. HP says the fx6 is 35 percent to 40 percent faster than the fx4.
Marcia Brooks, publisher of the Engineer Technology Advisor, a newsletter in Milwaukee, said the fx6 is the real breakthrough technology. "It's good news for anybody who wants to operate in the Wintel space in a technical environment to the kind of graphics performance it offers," she said.
The fx6 is designed for Open Graphics Language (OpenGL) application acceleration, which includes modeling tools such as Pro Engineer, 3D Studio MAX, and Lightwave 3D. The board is only sold with the Xeon-based Kayak XW, and HP said it outperforms the $150,000 Onyx2 workstation from Silicon Graphics in OpenGL performance.
The XU is no slouch in the graphics department either -- with its Permedia 2 video chip -- but it is designed primarily for 2-D graphics.
The new Kayaks have a dual-processor system, although the cases had to be redesigned to accommodate the much larger Xeon chip, according to Kathleen Tandy, North American product marketing manager for the Kayak
family at HP. Both use the 400-MHz Xeon, which Tandy said offers a 5 percent to 10 percent performance improvement over the 400-MHz Pentium II.
But HP (company profile) believes customers will want the new Xeon computers, even if they are only marginally faster. "It will be for customers who focus on areas with very [central processing unit]-intensive applications," she said. "In the financial markets, where you have people doing trading decisions, if they can do them 10
percent faster, that can result in thousands of dollars."
A 10 percent performance kick isn't a major step forward, but power-hungry users will take all the juice they can get, said Brooks. "There's only so much you can do with Wintel components," she said. "But this is a really strong class of machines for people who need to do design and engineering projects, better than what has been offered before in that space."
The new Kayaks join the existing family of workstations and are not replacing any systems, said Tandy. Both come with all the features of the workstations introduced last June: HP MaxiLife, an advanced diagnostic that works even when the PC is off; HP DiagTools, a diagnostics software package; and a monitor to identify which
parts of the system are causing bottlenecks, such as slow memory or hard disks.
The HP Kayak workstation XU will ship by the end of the month and will sell for $4,999. The HP Kayak Workstation XW will ship in September for $12,000, a $2,000 increase over the Pentium II XWs running an fx4
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