IDEAS Insights: Intel and HP held a workstation even called ‘QuadFest" in Westminster, Colorado as part of the launch of the Clovertown Xeon 5300 series and Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 quad-core processors. . For this announcement, Intel is using a number of different venues to get the word out. This specific event focused on the use of Intel quad-core processors in the high performance workstation market. HP announced three workstations based on the new processors, the xw4400, xw6400, and xw8400. The xw4400 uses the Core 2 Extreme processors, whereas the others use Xeon 5300 processors.

What made this event even more useful to analysts and customers is HP invited a number of ISVs and end-users to demonstrate the performance of its new quad-core workstations on real-world applications. Seeing live demos and talking with actual hands-on users is infinitely more useful than reading HP and Intel marketing claims. After experiencing this myself, I can honestly say that HP’s quad-core workstations are the way to go today for almost all HPC applications. Almost all of these applications were originally written for large UNIX SMP servers, so they are already multi-threaded and can take advantage of the multi-cores.

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