Desktop vs. workstation: Performance design

Hi, my name is Dave Buckley, and I'm the product line manager for work stations in North America for Hewlett Packard. I'm here to talk to you today a little bit about desktops versus work stations: performance design. 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 about fundamentally 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 can be PCI slots of different varieties.

There are also RAM slots, or those would be DIMMs -- in-line memory modules. With a work station, you can start out with as many as four DIMM slots, which is fairly consistent with a desktop, but you can expand a work station all the way up to eight or even 16 DIMM slots.

In order to drive all those PCI slots and DIMM slots, you need 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 can have as many as five hard disk drive bays, and also as many as three optical bays.

Expandability certainly characterizes a work station. Also, raw performance. The way that raw performance is delivered is -- first and fundamentally -- CPU performance. What I'm talking about here is, starting at the bottom end of the product line; we have a single socket that can have one or two processors. With the higher end of the product line -- with either a Xeon or Opteron box -- you can have a second processor that can also have two cores. 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 more and more applications becoming multi-threaded, eight cores can be incredibly important.

Of, course, the big challenge with a performance design is delivering the slots, watts and bays, as well as the raw performance, in a package that a customer can live with. And what I like to call this is "whisper quiet." Some work station vendors will saddle you with a box that will barely 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 station that's just very difficult for a customer to live with.

At Hewlett Packard, we work hard to deliver the slots, watts and bays and raw performance that a customer requires, with a relatively compact package that also has a nice, elegant acoustic footprint. "Whisper quiet" 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 a relatively low-speed fan that creates an acoustic footprint that customers can live with. And we end up with a package that customers can have underneath their 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. And finally, a package that a customer can live with, with a small acoustic footprint and a reasonable form factor. That's what creates a performance work station design.

For more information, go out to the URL www.hp.com/go/workstation.