By William Fellows

Looking to press home its advantage in the Windows NT workstation world, Hewlett-Packard Co is going to begin selling NT workstations direct under the Visualize brand which is currently reserved for its HP-UX Unix boxes. By transferring NT-based workstations which use fx graphics accelerators (that also drive HP-UX workstations) from the Kayak range in the performance desktop division, to the workstation systems division in Fort Collins, Colorado, HP also hopes to pick up new customers who have Unix-like buying requirements – build to order, full service and consulting support – but who want NT.

It will be able to leverage the Unix group’s specialist graphics expertise to carve out NT products for the MCAD and ECAD markets. It’s calling them Visualize Personal Workstations to differentiate them from their Unix cousins, and to start off with the recently-launched fx2+, fx4+ and fx6+-based Kayaks will be sold under the new model as the P-Class P450 and P500 and X-Class X500 and X550 priced from $3,225 to $8,900.

In time they will use dedicated motherboard technology and components. They are meant to head off the challenge from Silicon Graphics Inc and take on Integraph and other specialist NT workstation players. Kayaks are HP’s successful channel-only workstations which will remain merchant items. Following HP’s recent re-org there’s expected to be some renaming of the workstation groups.

The PA-RISC-based HP-UX workstations are also due to be made over with the new PA-8500 chip. The PA-8500 in the C360 workstation is running on three-year-old motherboard technology. HP does not expect Unix workstation users to go away. Some will always want Unix, some applications are still only available on Unix, and Unix workstation performance still far outpaces NT. Most importantly workstations users are the primary users of 64-bits, still purely a Unix play. Intel’s new Katmai multimedia extensions help, but Pentium III still can’t touch RISC for compute-intensive tasks such as graphics processing. The NT and Unix lines share common components but are manufactured separately. The NT Visualize boxes will in future go through the Unix workstation manufacturing facility.