HP injects blade PCs with fresh Athlons
The un-PC dream lives
HP has delivered a much needed refresh to its blade PC product line, upgrading the hardware and graphics performance of the systems.
HP released its last batch of Consolidated Client Infrastructure (CCI) gear way back in Nov. of 2005. The big transition taking place then was a shift from Transmeta-based systems to Athlon-based systems.
With its new BladeSystem bc2000 and bc2500 blade PCs, HP has stuck with the Athlon chips. The former ships with a single-core Athlon 64 2100+ chip, 80GB of SATA disk and 1GB of memory for $1,000 (if you agree to buy 10 systems). The bc2500 ships with a dual-core Athlon 64 X2 3000+ chip, 80GB of SATA disk and 1GB of memory for $1,500 - again in relative volume.
The systems account for half of HP's take on untraditional PCs. The company also sells a wide range of thin clients.
One of the main grumbles surrounding such products has been their inability to mimic the performance - nay, user experience - of a regular desktop. With that in mind, HP will ship its very own Remote Graphics software as part of PC Session Allocation Manager 2.0.
HP has included the Remote Graphics software with its blade workstations in the past. The software is based on a codec crafted by HP and Nasa that helps heavier workloads such as graphics streaming make their way from a blade PC out to a client terminal. HP sees the protocol as a complement to the popular remote desktop protocol (RDP), which also ships on HP's blade PCs.
While HP's core blade server line relies on the 10U c-Class chassis, the blade PCs come with their own 3U chassis, which can hold up to 20 blades.
If you're not convinced by the blade PC concept, we won't hold it against you. Numerous vendors have been banging on about thin clients and blade PCs for years.
The likes of Wyse, Citrix, HP, ClearCube, Sun Microsystems and IBM tell us that the technology will really take off now because of improvements in processing power and bandwidth. So there you have it. ®
COMMENTS
Specs
Well, considering that no single hard drive will ever make full use of SATA 3GBps, particularly a laptop hard drive, it doesn't matter. I can definitely understand it if they were using something closer to a 10 or 15K SAS hard drive.
As far as 10/100 LAN, that is the current limitation of the switch that is used (the blade PC uses the same infrastructure as the BL e-class blades from a little while back).
Using 32-bit Vista is most likely due to software and driver issues... not to mention, I don't exactly think that you can really put in 2GB or more of memory in that thing anyway. The blade PC is meant more for places that need pseudo-dedicated computers and don't or can't go down the route of a full terminal server.
It's not meant to be an uber-powerful system, it is meant to provide enough processing power needed for most desktop uses. If you need more, there is always the blade workstation or Clearcube.
Why do they hamstring themselves like that?
I looked up the specs. 32 bit vsta on a 64 bit proccy
667mhz memory on a 800MHz FSB
dual 10/100 lan when the CHIPSET provides dual gigabit
sata-150 when again the chipset provides sata-300.
WHY, Why, WHY!
I would buy these for my company this would make my job way easier, except they hamstrung the systems on every front.
/me *shakes head* and gives up on HP for another year.
