HP Kayak
| Company type | Product line |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer workstations |
| Founded | 1997 |
| Defunct | 2002 |
| Fate | Discontinued after Hewlett-Packard acquisition by Compaq |
| Products | x86 architecture workstations |
| Parent | Hewlett-Packard |
Kayak represented a series of x86 architecture workstations, optionally equipped with dual processors, manufactured by Hewlett-Packard from 1997 until the company's acquisition by Compaq in 2002. These workstations were aimed at the scientific computing and advanced 3D graphics industries and were shipped with Windows NT preinstalled.
History
In September 1997, HP launched the Kayak series alongside their Brio desktop computers designed for small office and home office environments. The initial lineup utilized Intel's Pentium II CPUs; subsequent models upgraded to include Pentium II Xeon, Pentium III, Pentium III Xeon, and eventually Pentium 4 processors. The Kayak was developed to rival Compaq’s Professional Workstation range within the high-performance computing domain. This product line marked HP's introduction into the Wintel workstation market, complementing their existing portfolio of RISC-based HP 9000 Unix workstations.
During the early 2000s, HP dominated the Wintel workstation market with the Kayak series but experienced a decline in market share to competitors such as Dell and their Precision workstations by late 2001. In 2001, HP rebranded the Kayak line as the HP Workstation in Europe starting with the x4000 model, followed by a similar rebranding effort in the United States by 2002.