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HP Unveils Mini Workstation

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Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#131

Post by revelation »

nkurz wrote: post #85

Is there an obvious reason that they stick with traditional air cooling for this, rather than using liquid cooling? Here's an example of a compact system with liquid cooled CPU and graphics card built using off-the-shelf parts: http://blog.newegg.com/building-a-mini-itx-gaming-pc/ I'd think that at this small size, you'd need really high air velocity to make it work. Coupled with small fans, this generally means the…

I'm not sure there is excessive fan noise here, they have two fans and customized heatpipe design for what, 60W of excess heat at full load?

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#132

Post by jsjohnst »

vetinari wrote: post #89
to3m wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've got enough displays, cable length can become a factor! This is much easier to solve if you've got your PC on your desk, and it's much easier to fit your PC on your desk if it's smaller rather than larger.

DisplayPort supports chaining (only two monitors, as master/slave, but hey, it's there).

Very few good monitors I've seen support it though. :(

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#133

Post by rch »

wscott wrote: post #65
mi100hael wrote: post #18

Support for six displays out of the box is pretty cool. I'm glad manufacturers are finally supporting more than just one or two displays by default.

If you have 6 displays on your desk, why does it matter that your computer is tiny? Maybe this is a nice portable gaming box...

A couple of times I've been stuck at a desk with limited foot room, despite being surrounded by monitors. This would have been helpful.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#134

Post by Declanomous »

Matthias247 wrote: post #87
daxorid wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the Skullcanyon NUC, and this is not comparable. I've been waiting for someone to offer me ECC in a small form factor. This is the first time I've ever seen it.

Just interested: What's your use case for ECC? Do you intend to run a server on it and aim for highest stability?

I'm putting money on something to do with ZFS. Turns out bit flips are significantly more common than had been thought in the past, which makes a error-correcting file system somewhat risky to use with normal non-ecc ram.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#135

Post by nextos »

intrasight wrote: post #82

I don't understand why they didn't use a Xeon e3-1545m, which is a 35-45 TDP part and has adequate graphics for the intended market. If it doesn't support ECC, there's no benefit vs the Intel Skull Canyon. I am in the market for a new dev machine, and I want Xeon and ECC. Just not enough good options currently (unless you build from scratch).

It does support ECC, but I don't understand its thermal design. Probably it's like NUCs, a small box for the sake of prettiness and a tiny-n-cheap fan that will be noisy.

It's a shame, because you can passively cool things like a i7-6700T these days without much effort and without ever falling into throttling [1]. Plus, Calyos is about to release a loop heat pipe that will be able to cool massive systems without any noise [2].

I wish someone like Apple or perhaps the new Microsoft had the vision to sell corporate desktops and workstations that did not suck noisewise. I imagine a little fanless Mac Mini running on Xeon would sell like hotcakes and would give Apple the chance to gain a further chunk of enterprise marketshare. But they don't seem to be interested.

[1] http://www.atlastsolutions.com/ultimate-fanless-mini-itx-pc-...

[2] http://www.calyos-tm.com/

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#136

Post by derefr »

Tempest1981 wrote: post #25

Tangent: I'm curious about HP's hostname taxonomy. I.e. What products or content live under www8 vs www2 or www7. http://www8.hp.com/.. .

Having seen these at several large corporations, I always figured it was either:

1. a division of labor: each corporate "division"—themselves large enough to have their own subsumed IT departments—gets its own hostname prefix to plan a routing map under.

2. a division in time: creating a new wwwN "prefix" allows them to "throw out" their old route-map and start again for new projects, while still keeping old projects on their existing routes at the old hostname.

My guess leans more toward the second option: corporations large enough to maintain extensive intranets have a particularly faithful dedication to the "cool URLs don't change" philosophy, because they don't want to go around fixing thousands of links built into dozens or hundreds of internal apps, emails, calendars, &c.

Of course, if you know you're going to do this from the beginning, you can just do what the W3 recommends, and begin each newly-defined route with a prefix for the current year+month (see https://www.w3.org/2005/07/13-nsuri).

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#137

Post by wlesieutre »

intrasight wrote: post #123
djrogers wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it doesn't support ECC, there's no benefit vs the Intel Skull Canyon. It does support ECC - right there on the product page.

I don't see that

First footnote in the linked press release, justifying them calling it "the world’s first mini workstation[1]"

[1] Based on publicly available information of workstation competitors as of October 3, 2016 with volume of at least 1 million units annually as of October 3, 2016 having ECC memory.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#138

Post by technofiend »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #41

See also the Intel NUC thing: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/nuc-kit-nuc6i7kyk... What really astonishes me though is how you can have these really nice machines and Apple doesn't bother to update the Mac mini. Seriously, an Apple version of this would be a nice desktop.

>What really astonishes me though is how you can have these really nice machines and Apple doesn't bother to update the Mac mini.

IMHO there is indeed a great deal of pent-up demand for more powerful Mac Minis. I really wish Apple wouldn't just treat them as incidental devices, but presumably there's not much incentive from their perspective since these are lower margin than their other offerings.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#139

Post by intrasight »

wlesieutre wrote: post #137
intrasight wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see that

First footnote in the linked press release, justifying them calling it "the world’s first mini workstation[1]" [1] Based on publicly available information of workstation competitors as of October 3, 2016 with volume of at least 1 million units annually as of October 3, 2016 having ECC memory .

So they implicitly rather than explicitly say they support ECC memory. That's a first.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#140

Post by SwellJoe »

nextos wrote: post #135
intrasight wrote: post #82

I don't understand why they didn't use a Xeon e3-1545m, which is a 35-45 TDP part and has adequate graphics for the intended market. If it doesn't support ECC, there's no benefit vs the Intel Skull Canyon. I am in the market for a new dev machine, and I want Xeon and ECC. Just not enough good options currently (unless you build from scratch).

It does support ECC, but I don't understand its thermal design. Probably it's like NUCs, a small box for the sake of prettiness and a tiny-n-cheap fan that will be noisy. It's a shame, because you can passively cool things like a i7-6700T these days without much effort and without ever falling into throttling [1]. Plus, Calyos is about to release a loop heat pipe that will be able to cool massive systems without any…

They specifically mention acoustics in the (long) text about it. I would assume that means they tried to make it quiet. Whether I believe them or not is up in the air, as my last HP workstation was louder than hell.
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