HP workstations push space, travel and film boundaries

At the launch of HP's latest Z-Series workstationsin Los Angeles, California, customers were out in force to sing the praises of the new machines.

One such was Space X, a company that said it was offering launch vehicles priced at a half to a third of competing offerings. To establish its credentials to the audience, the company said it had been hired by NASA to make 12 cargo flights up to the International Space Station using its Falcon 9 rocket.

"This isrocket science," said chief information officer of Space X, Brandon Spikes. "The Z800 is 45 per cent faster than our current HP xw8600 in our benchmarks." Spikes also said that adding an SSD added an additional five per cent to its scores, while the Nehalem's Turbo mode was very useful as Space X mainly used single threaded applications.

"It's not just performance that's important to us," he added, "but also reliability. Virtually every department uses a workstation so the faster and better they are, helps improve our bottom line."

Meanwhile, Adobe's senior director of product management, Simon Hayhust, hailed the revolutionary aspects of the new workstations explaining that it gave video editors the power to create a 4K video real-time workflow on a workstation something that had previously never been possible.

Hayhurst explained that it wasn't simply a case of enabling tasks to be performed quicker but that it enabled the viewing stakes to be raised.

"When I see and listen to these announcements I don't see technology, I see new ways of story-telling. If you're not pushing things creatively then you're not going to be pushing the technology and [conversely] if you're not pushing the envelope of technology then you're not pushing the boundaries of creativity."