System vendor Hewlett-Packard has introduced two extreme performance workstation offerings aiming at the film, video and broadcast industries. The unveiling took place during a keynote speech at the NAB 2008 expo in Las Vegas.

HP's updated high-end workstations, the HP xw8600 workstation and the HP xw9400 workstation, come equipped with Intel quad-core chips for maximized stability and unmatched performance required by the graphics-intensive applications in the movie industry. The new machines are especially used in processing 3D animations and special effects for the high-definition video segment.

"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 at 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."

The HP xw9400 workstation is a high-performance computing system and comes with two Quad-Core Intel Xeon X5482 chips, able to support an 1,600 MHz front side bus and memory frequencies of up to 800 MHz. The system is built on a dual-socket server motherboard, although other details are currently unknown.

The second high-end offering, the xw8600, is based on AMD's quad-core processors, and users have the chance to pick the CPUs from three new Quad-Core AMD Opteron 2300 processors. Despite the fact that both models already exist on the market, the refurnished versions are tweaked for maximum performance

The new workstation offerings are available for purchase immediately, but the manufacturer did not update its ordering forms to include the new processor options. xw9400 systems will come with a starting price of $2,578, while the lower-end xw8600 models will hit the shelves at an estimative starting price of $1,699.