HOUSTON – HP (www.hp.com) reported a very successful year for 2005. The HP workstation business grew at more than 1 percent for the market — year over year — showing continued growth in what’s considered a highly-competitive field.
Back in 2002, HP had 26 percent of the workstation market, and at the close of 2005, the company’s business is said to represent 33 percent. Jeff Wood, HP’s director, product marketing personal workstations, workstation global business unit, says the company’s workstation business has grown by 22 percent since the merger with Compaq back in 2002.
HP saw success with its “xw” line in 2005. Its entry-level xw4300 is a dual-core-capable P4-based system. The xw6200 is an Intel Xeon-based system with up to 8GB of system memory. The company’s xw8200 is also a Xeon-based system, with up to 16GB of system memory. This model is the foundation for Avid products such as its Nitris system. At the high end is HP’s xw9300, an AMD Opteron-based system that can be configured with two 3D cards from ATI or Nvidia right from the factory. The system boasts a maximum system memory of 32GBs.
Wood says the outlook for 2006 is promising and expects to see more of a migration over to 64-bit applications, as 2005 was a little slow. On the high end of its product line, Wood says look for more dual-core processing and memory expandability beyond 32GB.