HP harnesses NVIDIA graphical muscle for new workstation range

22nd November 2010
HP harnesses NVIDIA graphical muscle for new workstation range

Hewlett Packard  has showcased its latest lineup of professional workstations at its annual Workstations Solutions World road show that came to Bangalore last week at the end of its world tour.
The HP Z Workstation series, consisting of HP Z200 Workstation, HP Z400 Workstation, HP Z600 Workstation, and HP Z800 Workstation is the cornerstone of the company’s workstation Ecosystem.

The Workstation series features the newest NVIDIA Quadro graphical processors which promise up to 5x faster 3D performance and 8x faster computational simulation across a broad range of design, animation and video applications through up to 448 parallel processing cores
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The top-of-the-line Z800 workstation, also brings the cluster computing power of NVIDIA’s Tesla 1060 processor. The latest addition to the HP series, the Z200 Workstation squeezes the performance and reliability of a workstation into a surprisingly small package, at an affordable price ( around Rs 35,000). Tested and certified with MCAD and CAE applications, the Z200 SFF is about one third the size of conventional minitowers.

For On-the-Go power users, HP has also launched a series of mobile workstations: the EliteBook 8440w and HP EliteBook 8540w notebooks are engineered to meet MIL-STD 810G military-standard tests for vibration, dust, humidity, altitude, and high and low temperatures. The HP EliteBook 8740w Mobile Workstation is further equipped with the DreamColor display option that enables professionals to work with deep, accurate colors for precise results.

To dramatize the range of application environments for its workstations, HP used the event to introduce Graeme Hackland, chief information officer, for the Renault F1 Team who explained how the workstations were used on the Formula One race track – and behind the scenes -- to optimise the performance of Renault’s F1 challengers.

The HP Workstation range represents a smooth integration of traditional processors like Intel’s Zeon, core i5 and i7 -- with graphical processors like NVIDIA’s Quadro series -- and point to the way high performance image intense computation is headed.

The recent Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers as well as the Green 500 list of the most energy efficient computers also underlined the increasing domination of GPUs or graphical processing units: three of the world top five supercomputers in the Top500 and all the petaflop computers in the Green 500 rankings were fuelled by NVIDIA’s Tesla GPUs.

In India HP is the number one work station vendor with 56.3% market share according to the latest quarterly tracker of IDC.

Link to HP India workstation page: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/in/en/sm/WF02d/12454-12454-296719.html  
Link to NVIDIA Quadro page: http://www.nvidia.com/page/workstation.html 

Nov 22 2010