Workstation

Intel’s new 14-nm Xeon W 2200 processors

  Intel once envisioned a 2018 where 10-nm processors were shipping out of its fabs, followed by a subsequent introduction of a major new core microarchitecture. However, the company’s well-chronicled delays with 10-nm meant another “optimization” generation extending Skylake one more time on 14++ was in order to fill the gap. For the Core brand processors serving high-performance PC and Entry … Read more

Seems like old times… Rick Bergman returns to AMD

The doors spin round. AMD has announced former Synaptics CEO, and former AMD SVP/GM of the products group, Rick Bergman will return to lead the Computing and Graphics (CG) business segment for AMD. The CG group includes PC, gaming, and semi-custom businesses for AMD’s Ryzen CPUs, Radeon GPUs, and game console products and platforms.  It’s familiar territory for Bergman who … Read more

PC versus workstation: The differences matter

There's a line of reasoning that goes like this: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it's probably a duck. The assumption is that something can be identified by its characteristics and unique behavior. But, as we all know, looks and behavior can be deceiving. Such is the case with a … Read more

Apple launches their most powerful workstation ever

We the committed—wait. Mill around outside 08:30 to 09:00, seated 09:00, show starts at 10:00, ends 12:30—fours of Applesauce Apple’s slick back cylindrical Mac Pro circa 2013. (Source: Apple)   Dub dub has never been boring or trite, and this year was no exception, except it was exceptional. Everybody and their cat is writing about all the stuff Apple announced … Read more

Intel Q1 2019 results

Intel reported its calendar Q1 2019, revenues were flat year-over-year and achieved 4% growth in the PC-centric business while data-centric revenue declined 5%. “We shipped a strong mix of high-performance products and continued spending discipline while ramping 10 nm and managing a challenging NAND pricing environment. Looking ahead, we're taking a more cautious view of the year, although we expect … Read more

HP updates its Z workstations with Cascade Lake

HP came to NAB with good friends Intel to show off their new workstations, which just happened to be perfect for video content creation, VFX, and other memory intensive jobs. The broadcast and content creation industry is now squarely in the middle of working with demanding 4K workflows and negotiating the challenges of creating HDR content and 8K is clearly … Read more

Chaos Group demos Project Lavina; realtime ray tracing

Forest animation rendered in realtime with Chaos’ new Lavina technology. The scene has over 300 billion triangles and 80,000 instances running at 24–30 frames per second with no rasterized graphics or reduced level of detail as might be used for game engine rendering. In this case, the render was performed on Nvidia’s Quadro RTX GPUs.  Chaos Group showcased its new … Read more

HP’s Sprout blossom: the Z3D camera

In 2018, the HP Sprout all-in-one creative content workstation got a significant upgrade as HP took in all the response it received to the original product and made significant changes to relaunch the next version, the Sprout Pro G2. Like the original Sprout, the Pro G2 includes a 3D camera to enable an integrated scanning workflow and adds a 20-point … Read more

Intel launches Coffee Lake Xeon E (rebrand) for Entry 1S workstations

It’s been roughly two decades since workstation OEMs were building new models on their own schedules. Back in the 90’s, vertically integrated industry pioneers like SGI, HP, Sun, IBM, and DEC produced everything, from the chassis and operating systems to the CPU and GPU chips inside. They introduced new workstations whenever they were able to deliver all the key components … Read more