If you’re still working at an office with a clunky old 486 and a CRT monitor, we’re… pretty sure that constitutes employee abuse. How about you convince your boss to upgrade you to one of these — HP’s new Z8 workstation, which contains the kind of hardware you need to operate the International Space Station or hack into the NSA. Or use several open instances of PhotoShop at the same time.
The HP Z8 supports twin Intel Skylake-SP processors, the biggest options of which are the Xeon Platinum 8180 CPU, which clock in at a total of 28 cores and 56 threads. Each. In that configuration, the Z8 supports up to 1.5TB of RAM but it’ll support up to 3TB of RAM across its 24 RAM slots when the Xeon Platinum 8180M processor version lands next year. The ‘M’ doubles the supported RAM but keeps the core/thread count and 2.5GHz to 3.8GHz clock speeds.
Up to three Nvidia Quadro P6000 or AMD Radeon Pro WX 9100 GPUs can be fielded by the Z8 at once. There’s enough internal space for 4TB of solid-state drives and a further 48TB of conventional platter storage, in case you never want to delete anything ever again. The workstation supports all of the current wireless standards, up to 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.2, and even Thunderbolt 3, should you want that.
The HP Z8 will be starting at $2,440 (R32,000 or so) but fully loaded it should move the needle past the R500,000 mark. There are also lower-specced (and therefore -priced) Z6 and Z4 workstations on the way as well, for people who don’t quite need to render 8K video or expansive 3D environments in real-time. So… still not something that your boss is going to be willing to chuck out that dusty old 486 for, then.
Source: Ars Technica