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HP Unveils Mini Workstation

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Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#191

Post by gregmac »

yardie wrote: post #170
gregmac wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately there's no way to buy it without the included SSDs Ah, brings back memories of buying HP servers several years ago. The only way to get the servers we needed was to buy servers pre-shipped with inadequate RAM and drives, rip it all out, and then install new drives and new RAM (purchased at the same time from HP, for an inflated price of course). We were left with a pile of essentially useless SAS driv…

What shitty vendor is this? Our VAR handles all of that for us. 48 Dimms, 16 SAS drives, P420e, and loads of nics. And they did the firmware updates and checked for defects. The only thing I needed to do was rack it and kick off the PXE install.

At the time, every HP reseller. They had some kind of gold/platinum/bronze partner system where specific resellers could only order certain parts. I don't know if this is still the case, but honestly the whole thing was an immensely frustrating experience.

I could order direct, but was very limited in what I could customize. We worked with a couple different resellers, but they were also limited (each in different ways), and ultimately did purchase through one of them.

I don't remember all the specifics now, but the main factor was the database servers which had high storage and very high I/O requirements. I think the only way to get the drive config we needed was to get something with 4 or 5x the CPU, and the cost accordingly skyrocketed. These days a couple SSD's could easily beat the performance of the 12 or so drives we had at the time, but in 2009-ish the limited SSD stuff on the market was out of reach.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#192

Post by wmf »

Bud wrote: post #90
xlayn wrote: post #61

HP Mac Mini. This is actually interesting, when Apple switched to max 16 Gb of ram on their PRO line, HP throws something with PRO graphics and Xeon.

Apples and oranges. Intel's mobile Skylake processors don't support more than 16GB of low-power RAM; Apple didn't have anything to do with that limitation. This is a boxy desktop, not a mobile machine.

Or Apple could have used pro RAM in the MacBook Pro.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#193

Post by roel_v »

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?

Not OP, but for me, numerical simulation. I don't have the numbers to 'prove' that corruption is really a serious problem for my use cases, or what the effects would be on my results, but for a few hundred extra, I figured why not go for a Xeon/ECC platform.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#194

Post by gregmac »

znpy wrote: post #161
gregmac wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately there's no way to buy it without the included SSDs Ah, brings back memories of buying HP servers several years ago. The only way to get the servers we needed was to buy servers pre-shipped with inadequate RAM and drives, rip it all out, and then install new drives and new RAM (purchased at the same time from HP, for an inflated price of course). We were left with a pile of essentially useless SAS driv…

Why was hp hardware a requirement? What was so special about hp hardware?

Entirely political reasons. Driven by the customer and agreed to by our sales people before ever talking to technical staff.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#195

Post by roel_v »

rch wrote: post #125
intrasight wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had really meant to say "not enough good mini/laptop options"

Fair enough. My main ergonomic requirement for a workstation is zero noise at rest, and reasonable otherwise. I'm interested in seeing what I can get in form factor though.

What I did (but I'll admit this is not an option in many cases) is to move my workstation into a rack in the basement, with 20m DisplayPort cables connecting the monitors and a 20m usb3 extender cable hooking up a usb hub on the desk for keyboard, mouse, usb storage etc.

Let the computer be loud there - noise has become a non-issue when selecting parts. It has a gtx1070 GPU which gets quite noisy under load (gpgpu processing). All 'workstations' I had in the past, like from Dell, got quite load under load, and had (baseline) loud power supplies as well.

I do need access to the power button more often than I thought, so I'll have to wire the front panel power button to a button on my desk.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#196

Post by roel_v »

to3m wrote: post #76
wscott wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

I use 20m active DisplayPort cables to have my workstation rack-mounted in the basement. I love it.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#197

Post by EdSharkey »

IanCal wrote: post #165
EdSharkey wrote: post #162

I am hungry for news of HP's "The Machine" or whatever they're calling it, which is the big iron that will leverage and be built around the memristor-based memory. Any progress on that development?

They dropped the memristors from it last year: https://www.engadget.com/2015/06/05/hp-the-machine-no-memris...

Thanks. Sucks they couldn't make it work.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#198

Post by yuhong »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #185
yuhong wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at "Pin Assignments" in: https://www.micron.com/products/datasheets/9790eab7-a778-48a... https://www.micron.com/products/datasheets/cd774d8b-45be-402...

Sorry, I was being less pedantic than I should have been. Thanks for the correction and have an upvote. They're "incompatible" in the sense that the pinouts differ, but an ECC-capable DDR3 machine can use both ECC and non-ECC memory; however, the pinout incompatibility means that a non-ECC-capable machine cannot use ECC RAM (but then, who would want to spend the extra $$ for ECC RAM when their machine doesn't support…

The SO-DIMM pinouts are different enough that this is not true either.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#199

Post by jitix »

HP has been coming up with some really innovative PC systems. And they almost sold the PC division few years back.

This is a good development - PC market might have shrunk considerably but it's not going to go away.

Re: HP Unveils Mini Workstation

#200

Post by Merad »

It looks nice, but beyond looks I don't really get the appeal. If you want and/or need the power, and you're already planning to have 3-6 monitors on your desk, why not go for a slightly larger box that can hold reasonable cooling solutions that don't sound like a jet taking off when the PC is under the slightest load? IME, HP is terrible about considering the noise of their designs. Our current work laptops are HP 1040 G3's, and it doesn't take much get the fans spinning at a noticeable volume (playing a video + a couple instances of VS + the normal outlook/web browsers/etc). The 1040 at least has been an upgrade over our old HP laptops (I forget the model) where the fan seemed to run at 100% all the time.
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