HP Announces Performance-Boosted Workstations, Starts DreamWorks Collaboration

Hewlett Packard has announced today the launch of two performance-boosted workstation computers for digital content professionals. These two versions of its high-end personal workstation are designed for use in the broadcast, film/video post-production, animation and graphic arts industries. The company has also announced that it would join DreamWorks Animation in a National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) keynote address at a show in Las Vegas. This might be the beginning of a further breakthrough product collaboration between the two companies.

"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."

Todd Bradley, executive vice president of the Personal Systems Group at HP, and Roger Enrico, chairman of the board of DreamWorks Animation, will be describing the way in which creativity helps technology advance and opens doors for new contents. The presentation will take place during an afternoon keynote address. Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive officer and director of DreamWorks Animation will have a video appearance featured in the "Digital Innovation: What You Dream is What You Get" address. The discussion will include future highly integrated systems able to provide higher levels of digital color consistency between devices.

HP xw8600 and HP xw9400, the two high-end HP workstations that have been updated bring to the table the latest quad-core processor technology and provide quite a performance boost for the power users working with real-time video, high definition, animation and special effects. Two Quad-Core Intel Xeon X5482 processors with a 1,600-MHz front side bus, 800-MHz memory and HP's world-class expandability and reliability are included into the HP xw8600 workstation, the one that provides the most performance from the two. Three new Quad-Core AMD Opteron 2300 processors are included in the HP xw9400 workstation.

HP workstations have been already used by professionals in the broadcast, film/video post-production and animation industries to power their highly demanding applications. Shrek movie series and Bee Movie have been brought to life by DreamWorks Animation artists using HP's powerful workstations. HP workstations have been used by Bungie's game development team to power up the highly anticipated Halo 3 game. Belo Corporation and A&E Television Networks use HP workstations to produce TV journalism and a wide range of standard and high-definition programming across their networks.