Hi, my name is Dave Buckley, and I'm the product linemanager for work stations in North America for Hewlett Packard. I'm here totalk to you today a little bit about desktops versus work stations: performancedesign. How to create a performance design for a work station.
A couple of key things here. First, the basics are slots,watts and bays.
When I'm talking about slots, I'm talking aboutfundamentally PCI slots. In my diagram over here, I've drawn a few PCI slots.With a work station you're scalable up to as many as seven slots, and they canbe PCI slots of different varieties.
There are also RAM slots, or those would be DIMMs -- in-linememory modules. With a work station, you can start out with as many as fourDIMM slots, which is fairly consistent with a desktop, but you can expand awork station all the way up to eight or even 16 DIMM slots.
In order to drive all those PCI slots and DIMM slots, youneed a lot of power supply performance, all the way up to 800 watts of power.And, of course, you need a lot of I/O. With a typical work station, you canhave as many as five hard disk drive bays, and also as many as three opticalbays.
Expandability certainly characterizes a work station. Also,raw performance. The way that raw performance is delivered is -- first andfundamentally -- CPU performance. What I'm talking about here is, starting atthe bottom end of the product line; we have a single socket that can have oneor two processors. With the higher end of the product line -- with either aXeon or Opteron box -- you can have a second processor that can also have twocores. And we've just recently introduced four cores in our work station line.So, as an alternative, you can have your two sockets -- each with four cores --for a grand total of eight cores to bring to bear on the problem. And with moreand more applications becoming multi-threaded, eight cores can be incrediblyimportant.
Of, course, the big challenge with a performance design isdelivering the slots, watts and bays, as well as the raw performance, in apackage that a customer can live with. And what I like to call this is "whisperquiet." Some work station vendors will saddle you with a box that willbarely fit underneath a desktop, or it won't even fit into a 19-inch box. And,what I like to call this is a "frankenstation". It's a work stationthat's just very difficult for a customer to live with.
At Hewlett Packard, we work hard to deliver the slots, wattsand bays and raw performance that a customer requires, with a relativelycompact package that also has a nice, elegant acoustic footprint. "Whisperquiet" can imply elegant cable routing. It can imply minimized duct work.It can also imply elegant fan technology. So, what we do is we incorporate arelatively low-speed fan that creates an acoustic footprint that customers canlive with. And we end up with a package that customers can have underneaththeir desktop and easily live with.
So, what characterizes a performance design? First: slots,watts and bays. Next: raw performance, whether it's CPU, graphics or I/O. Andfinally, a package that a customer can live with, with a small acousticfootprint and a reasonable form factor. That's what creates a performance workstation design.
For more information, go out to the URLwww.hp.com/go/workstation.
