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Hewlett-Packard Co. is rolling out a RISC-based workstation that officials said will boost performance at almost half the price of the current model.
The key to the Workstation c8000, which is being released Tuesday, is its use of the new PA-8800 processor at 900MHz or 1GHz, a dual-core chip that will enable the two-way system to do the work of a four-way workstation, said Rachel McClary, worldwide product marketing manager for workstations at HP. The chip also can run the companys Unix-based HP-UX 10.20, 11 and 11i applications, and is binary compatible with the 8700+ chip, McClary said.
In addition, the workstation, which starts at $9,312, includes HPs zx1 chip set that offers low latency and high bandwidth capabilities, with up to 25 percent lower memory latency than the 8700+. It also is the same chip set used in the companys Itanium-based systems, a key step along the migration path toward HPs standardization on Intel Corp.-based processors, including the 64-bit Itanium processor.
HP, of Palo Alto, Calif., will continue development of the PA-RISC chips with one more version after the 8800—the PA-8900—and will sell systems running the chip through 2006 and support them into 2011. However, eventually systems that run the HP-UX operating system will join others on Itanium-based systems.
The Workstation c8000 also will offer AGP 8X graphics capabilities via cards from ATI Technologies Inc., offering up to four times the graphics performance of the current Workstation c8750, McClary said.
The workstation will enable users such as engineers and designers to speed up their product lifecycles while driving down the cost of development.