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HP Ink shrinks workstations to puckish form factor

Status symbol Xeon colosso-towers get the Apple TV treatment

HP Ink has decided that workstations need to follow the business PC trend of shrinking into form factors resembling the Apple Mini or even the Apple TV.

The new HP Z2 G3 Mini Workstation therefore packs fifth-generation Xeons, aka Skylake, into a box just 21.6cm c 21.6cm by 5.9cm (8.5 x 8.5 x 2.28 inches). Cunning Reg readers will have glanced at the illustration above (here on mobile devices) and noted its notched corners. They help with ventilation, as there's a pair of fans inside too.

Also lying within is an Nvidia Quadro M620 2GB, because what's a workstation without grunty graphics? Three Display Ports can power as many monitors while a pair of USB 3.1 ports will connect to other gadgets. A USB 3.0 port provides power.

Gigabit ethernet gets the machine on the LAN, there's also a WiFi and Bluetooth option.

Feel free to load 32GB of RAM and up to two drives packing 1.5TB of storage.

And then hide the thing, either behind a monitor or under a desk, because HP Ink has added all the holes and mounting plates necessary to do so.

Which is perhaps the biggest change of all: workstations have often come in colosso-tower form factors that carry a certain “don't mess with me” vibe.

With that gone, perhaps the emerging workstation-grade cloud alternatives, like Teradici's new and more graphically-endowed zero clients or Amazon Web Services new GPU-enhanced WorkSpaces will become more attractive? ®

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