Palo Alto, CA 8 July 2002--HP today announced the worldwide launch of an extensive portfolio of Intel Itanium 2 “McKinley”-based systems, integrated solutions and comprehensive services. With this launch, HP delivers the industry’s broadest offering of Intel Itanium 2-based servers and workstations featuring breakthrough price and performance for HP-UX, Windows and Linux environments. In addition, the availability of HP-UX on IA64 ensures that customers will for the first time be able to run an enterprise-class operating system on Intel’s 64-bit CPU.

“Our customers win today as HP’s Itanium 2-based solutions deliver unmatched value,” said Peter Blackmore, executive vice president, HP Enterprise Systems Group. “Customers get maximized business computing power with the benefits of breakthrough performance and scalability at a low cost. With HP’s unparalleled expertise and comprehensive services, customers can quickly and seamlessly incorporate Itanium 2-based systems into their environments. In addition, with HP, the path for future growth is clear and customers' IT investments are protected.”

“Our joint effort with HP has delivered an exceptional architecture and products that will deliver the scalability, reliability, investment protection and absolute performance for the most demanding enterprise needs,” said Mike Fister, senior vice president and general manager, Intel Enterprise Platforms Group. “HP has developed a comprehensive portfolio of Itanium 2-based products complete with chipsets, a choice of operating systems, software and a broad family of server and workstation models that bolster Intel's efforts in this demanding market segment.”

Enabled by the high-bandwidth, low-latency HP Chipset zx1, HP’s new systems deliver record-breaking performance benchmarks that address customers' most complex and data-intensive workloads at better prices and performance than comparable RISC platforms. IBM’s POWER4 processor and HP’s soon-to-ship 1.25GHz Alpha EV68C processor are the only RISC CPUs that offer performance approaching or slightly exceeding that of Intel’s McKinley chip.

HP’s new Itanium 2-based system range includes:

The HP Workstation zx2000, the industry’s first Itanium 2-based 900 MHz uni-processor workstation with 2D and 3D AGP graphics and the industry’s best floating point performance, priced similarly to an IA-32 workstation starting at an estimated U.S. street price of $4,500 USD.

The HP Workstation zx6000, with the industry's most flexible and scalable redeployment options for a uni- or dual-processor 900 or 1 GHz workstation with 2D and 3D AGP graphics, starting at an estimated U.S. street price of $6,400 USD.

The HP Server rx2600, supporting up to 2 CPUs running at 900 MHz or 1 GHz with high compute density for excellent cluster-based computing, starting at an estimated U.S. price of $7,300 USD.

The HP Server rx5670, a four-way entry-level server, supporting up to 4 processors running at 900 MHz or 1 GHz, offering the world’s only in-box upgrades to the Intel Itanium architecture from an existing RISC server, starting at an estimated U.S. street price of $23,400 USD.

At Your Service

HP’s Itanium 2-based ecosystem also includes a wide array of integrated systems and services management solutions that allow customers to seamlessly monitor, deploy and provision systems and to enable service creation, assurance and usage for their customers. HP’s portfolio also includes a suite of high-availability solutions to ensure data integrity and protect applications and environments against downtime.

HP’s lifecycle services enable customers to quickly integrate the Itanium architecture into their IT infrastructure with rapid deployment, support and the peak performance of HP's Itanium 2-based systems. The new services include planning, porting and migration, implementation, support and education to provide a smooth transition to HP's Itanium 2-based systems.

The HP and Intel Solution Centers located in Grenoble, France, and Cupertino, Calif., provide customers access to HP and Intel expertise and now offer a broad range of Itanium 2-based systems and a complete Internet data center environment to facilitate easy integration into their existing architectures.

In addition, HP and Intel are creating Itanium 2-based development reference platforms, consisting of HP's Itanium 2-based servers and software development tools for ISVs developing HP-UX, Windows and Linux applications. The expanded solution centers and reference platform give customers the immediate benefit of high-quality Itanium-based solutions that can be quickly implemented.

hp's Itanium 2 Performance Presentation v1.5 (.ppt)

(C) 2002 Terry C. Shannon, Shannon Knows HPC