HP wants you to buy dreamy DreamWorks workstations
HP's xw8600 and xw9400 bear their dry, meaningless names with pride: these quad-core workstations are for the most moneyed and power-hungry creative types only.
The one with the lower number is the higher-performing machine — HP adds a whole sentence to make this specific representation clear — and sports dual Xeon X5482 quad-core CPUs. The relatively disgusting xw9400 stacks up to three AMD 2300 Opterons. Boo!
The brilliant part is HP's fantastic press release, which hamfistedly ties in these workaday powerhouses with DreamWorks. DreamWorks uses similar machines from HP to render its animations, see, and will co-present a keynote speech with HP at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Vegas.
“Our personal workstations are widely known as the favorite workhorses of the NAB industry’s top professionals,” said John Thompson, vice president and general manager, Workstations, Personal Systems Group, HP. “A new generation of multimedia content, and the incredible groundswell of creativity behind it, is driving technology innovation to new heights. We continue to help power this movement with the latest performance enhancements in our workstations.”
BBG will shortly debut a special method for dealing with this kind of press release, and this magnificent paragraph will be its first level. In the meantime, just enjoy that incredible groundswell on the new heights.
Press Release [HP]
the latest
latest episodes
These are the systems used by artists for animation and the like, not for rendering.
I tried to have my employer get me one of these from the xw line, but sticker shock on my IT director's part inspired him to declare, "dude, you're getting a Dell."
They're really supposed to be fantastic machines, despite the marketers' BS.
I don't know much about DreamWorks- (well, I drove by it a couple of times if that counts) but the HP xw8600 and its predecessors are the computer shipped with Avid editing systems such as their Symphony Nitris. Any post production operation in LA probably has a couple of HP workstations like these running Media Composer, Symphony or Avid DS Nitris. This would probably include DreamWorks.