What really astonishes me though is how you can have these really nice machines and Apple doesn't bother to update the Mac mini. Seriously, an Apple version of this would be a nice desktop.
What really astonishes me though is how you can have these really nice machines and Apple doesn't bother to update the Mac mini.
It would almost have been better if they didn't update it. The 2012 mini was fantastic; you could take it to a quad i7 and 16GB for under $1000 thanks to user-accessible RAM. For most purposes that's much better than the current $1000 mini.
>What really astonishes me though is how you can have these really nice machines and Apple doesn't bother to update the Mac mini.
IMHO there is indeed a great deal of pent-up demand for more powerful Mac Minis. I really wish Apple wouldn't just treat them as incidental devices, but presumably there's not much incentive from their perspective since these are lower margin than their other offerings.
Absolutely - my main computer is an iMac, which will soon be replaced by another iMac (5K), however as someone who builds and upgrades a gaming rig as well, I always look with envy towards the very affordable world of PCs. I'd love to be able to slap macOS on custom build computers for a fraction of the price that is attached to Apple hardware.
I did some caching/content distribution/load balancing work for HP many years ago (maybe 10 years ago, now).
The names are (or were) geographic and divisional. Their infrastructure is (or was) pretty old school. While they do have load balancing and such, it is often of the form of redirects based on locality or other information. People in Hong Kong or China starting on HP.com in the US would find themselves bounced over to servers in Hong Kong, based on their language and where their traffic was being routed to/from. They mirrored tons of their data automatically with Squid proxies and just additional web servers. So, once a user gets directed to a local HP site, they'll tend to stay on it...and if content doesn't exist in the local cache, it'll pull it from the origin. HP has tons of public server names not just in the wwwN.hp.com space.
So, while I don't have specific information about www8 vs www2, etc. Based on my own experience with their infrastructure, I would assume it is the most boring explanation. They need several servers to provide good service, so they just give various divisions their own servers. This was the case in Hong Kong, Korea, and China, where my work was deployed. They do have load balancing and content distribution and such (and did even back then), but the actual web services were pretty traditional; they just ran on a server somewhere.
Based on a google site: search and an eyeball of the first couple of results pages I'd summarise as
www2 - partnering, alliances education [1]
www3 - investor relations, careers [2]
www4 - central european languages [3]
www5 - japanese [4]
www6 - no results found
www7 - open vms [5]
www8 - seems to be the primary site for english content
Having seen these at several large corporations, I always figured it was either:
1. a division of labor: each corporate "division"—themselves large enough to have their own subsumed IT departments—gets its own hostname prefix to plan a routing map under.
2. a division in time: creating a new wwwN "prefix" allows them to "throw out" their old route-map and start again for new projects, while still keeping old projects on their existing routes at the old hostname.
My guess leans more toward the second option: corporations large enough to maintain extensive intranets have a particularly faithful dedication to the "cool URLs don't change" philosophy, because they don't want to go around fixing thousands of links built into dozens or hundreds of internal apps, emails, calendars, &c.
Of course, if you know you're going to do this from the beginning, you can just do what the W3 recommends, and begin each newly-defined route with a prefix for the current year+month (see https://www.w3.org/2005/07/13-nsuri).
Edit: The Z2 Mini supports Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 processors, in addition to Xeon E3 processors. It also supports up to 32GB of DDR4 SO-DIMM memory, and the unit can be equipped with Nvidia Quadro M620 graphics with 2GB of memory. (from http://www.tomshardware.com/news/hp-z2-mini-g3-workstation,3...)
Any idea to which consumer card the Quadro M620 correlates? If it's something halfway decent then it might be a also a much better ultraportable gaming solution for some people than e.g. a NUC. However that also depends on if the Quadro drivers are suitable for gaming or not.
By pre-defining specs for the device, you can obviously create a sleak box for it with no wasted space, but I would claim it will always be impossible to create something as powerful as something 4 times its size, given the larger components are still produced, just going off physics. Otherwise no one would still build towers and just use laptops. (Of course more people use laptops, but it's not because of performance)
Since they don't mention specs other than "next gen xeon and nvidia graphics", and the only claim to power is "Building off the success of the HP Z240 SFF, the HP Z2 Mini Workstation is twice as powerful as any commercial mini PC on the market today", I won't hold my breath.
Getting better performance than "other mini PCs" is a pretty low bar for a stationary workstation. I'm unsure who this is for. It's not a laptop, so you can't bring it with you. A midtower would have better performance and can be strapped under your desk so you never see it.
You wouldn't be able to build anything as powerful as these HP offerings, because they can custom fab parts to pack in ram and high end processors in a smaller density (like laptops) and build a lot of custom heat dispensations components as well.
Still, there are Thin-ITX boards that can support a decent amount of ram and power, just not Xeons or high end video cards.
Four times the size can also be tremendously counter-productive, in terms of having a big empty space that air swirls around in. Cooling is a pain in the arse.
It does support ECC, but I don't understand its thermal design. Probably it's like NUCs, a small box for the sake of prettiness and a tiny-n-cheap fan that will be noisy.
It's a shame, because you can passively cool things like a i7-6700T these days without much effort and without ever falling into throttling [1]. Plus, Calyos is about to release a loop heat pipe that will be able to cool massive systems without any noise [2].
I wish someone like Apple or perhaps the new Microsoft had the vision to sell corporate desktops and workstations that did not suck noisewise. I imagine a little fanless Mac Mini running on Xeon would sell like hotcakes and would give Apple the chance to gain a further chunk of enterprise marketshare. But they don't seem to be interested.
They probably just wanted to show off the 6-display config for that photo. Stock traders are much more likely to use that particular display arrangement than engineers.
"world’s first mini workstation" my ass (and no, the footnote doesn't make it so). Here's one that supports 7 4k displays and has no fan: https://airtop-pc.com/
It looks nice, but beyond looks I don't really get the appeal. If you want and/or need the power, and you're already planning to have 3-6 monitors on your desk, why not go for a slightly larger box that can hold reasonable cooling solutions that don't sound like a jet taking off when the PC is under the slightest load? IME, HP is terrible about considering the noise of their designs. Our current work laptops are HP 1040 G3's, and it doesn't take much get the fans spinning at a noticeable volume (playing a video + a couple instances of VS + the normal outlook/web browsers/etc). The 1040 at least has been an upgrade over our old HP laptops (I forget the model) where the fan seemed to run at 100% all the time.
One upside is that this will fit in your carry-on luggage. Cheaper than a beefy laptop, but I'm not sure portability buys you much if you'd need to think about mouse/keyboard/monitor too.
If they can actually pull it off without the device either melting or spinning its fans fast enough to achieve escape velocity, it does sound like a pretty sweet deal.
I get the feeling people who have security folks that need 6 monitors will be ordering this. It sure would be a nice replacement for the box we have now. The small size is a big benefit.
Even a Macbook Pro can drive 4 external displays and the internal display at the same time. The Mac Pro that came out in 2013 can drive 6.
The question is really up to the GPU makers to put the right output capacity on their cards, and the integrator to hook up all the ports and make sure the software actually works.
This is very nice. I used to have a mac mini and would toss it in my backpack so I could work at home (I had two sets of displays and good keyboards). I can see this working out the same (well I work from home now all the time, but in a general sense I see it used that way too).
Seeing stuff like this on HN brings excitement back into tech for me. New hardware and debatably a challenger to the Mac mini and Intel NUC? Very cool stuff.
I am hungry for news of HP's "The Machine" or whatever they're calling it, which is the big iron that will leverage and be built around the memristor-based memory.
it was a hype machine. the leader of HP labs just kind of made up a machine that combined all the experimental technologies the labs were working on (terrible idea: make a product that requires N experimental projects to all work out).
It's certainly not an Industry first, nor a "World's First" as the press release claims.
[1]Based on publicly available information of workstation competitors as of October 3, 2016 with volume of at least 1 million units annually as of October 3, 2016 having < 3 litres volume, professional graphics, Intel® Xeon® quad core processor, ISV certified applications, ECC memory.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|9 years ago|reply
What really astonishes me though is how you can have these really nice machines and Apple doesn't bother to update the Mac mini. Seriously, an Apple version of this would be a nice desktop.
[+] [-] orangecat|9 years ago|reply
It would almost have been better if they didn't update it. The 2012 mini was fantastic; you could take it to a quad i7 and 16GB for under $1000 thanks to user-accessible RAM. For most purposes that's much better than the current $1000 mini.
[+] [-] daxorid|9 years ago|reply
I've been waiting for someone to offer me ECC in a small form factor. This is the first time I've ever seen it.
[+] [-] technofiend|9 years ago|reply
IMHO there is indeed a great deal of pent-up demand for more powerful Mac Minis. I really wish Apple wouldn't just treat them as incidental devices, but presumably there's not much incentive from their perspective since these are lower margin than their other offerings.
[+] [-] kristianp|9 years ago|reply
It would compete with the IMac then, and with their notebooks too. Maybe Apple should charge enough of a premium for the mini to justify that loss.
[+] [-] thirdsun|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilaksh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tempest1981|9 years ago|reply
http://www8.hp.com/...
[+] [-] SwellJoe|9 years ago|reply
The names are (or were) geographic and divisional. Their infrastructure is (or was) pretty old school. While they do have load balancing and such, it is often of the form of redirects based on locality or other information. People in Hong Kong or China starting on HP.com in the US would find themselves bounced over to servers in Hong Kong, based on their language and where their traffic was being routed to/from. They mirrored tons of their data automatically with Squid proxies and just additional web servers. So, once a user gets directed to a local HP site, they'll tend to stay on it...and if content doesn't exist in the local cache, it'll pull it from the origin. HP has tons of public server names not just in the wwwN.hp.com space.
So, while I don't have specific information about www8 vs www2, etc. Based on my own experience with their infrastructure, I would assume it is the most boring explanation. They need several servers to provide good service, so they just give various divisions their own servers. This was the case in Hong Kong, Korea, and China, where my work was deployed. They do have load balancing and content distribution and such (and did even back then), but the actual web services were pretty traditional; they just ran on a server somewhere.
[+] [-] jjp|9 years ago|reply
www2 - partnering, alliances education [1] www3 - investor relations, careers [2] www4 - central european languages [3] www5 - japanese [4] www6 - no results found www7 - open vms [5] www8 - seems to be the primary site for english content
[1] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww2.hp.com [2] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww3.hp.com [3] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww4.hp.com [4] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww5.hp.com [5] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww7.hp.com [6] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww8.hp.com
[+] [-] jasonmp85|9 years ago|reply
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/09/hp-license-plate...
[+] [-] derefr|9 years ago|reply
1. a division of labor: each corporate "division"—themselves large enough to have their own subsumed IT departments—gets its own hostname prefix to plan a routing map under.
2. a division in time: creating a new wwwN "prefix" allows them to "throw out" their old route-map and start again for new projects, while still keeping old projects on their existing routes at the old hostname.
My guess leans more toward the second option: corporations large enough to maintain extensive intranets have a particularly faithful dedication to the "cool URLs don't change" philosophy, because they don't want to go around fixing thousands of links built into dozens or hundreds of internal apps, emails, calendars, &c.
Of course, if you know you're going to do this from the beginning, you can just do what the W3 recommends, and begin each newly-defined route with a prefix for the current year+month (see https://www.w3.org/2005/07/13-nsuri).
[+] [-] r1k|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petepete|9 years ago|reply
Edit: The Z2 Mini supports Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 processors, in addition to Xeon E3 processors. It also supports up to 32GB of DDR4 SO-DIMM memory, and the unit can be equipped with Nvidia Quadro M620 graphics with 2GB of memory. (from http://www.tomshardware.com/news/hp-z2-mini-g3-workstation,3...)
[+] [-] Matthias247|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] detaro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] croon|9 years ago|reply
Since they don't mention specs other than "next gen xeon and nvidia graphics", and the only claim to power is "Building off the success of the HP Z240 SFF, the HP Z2 Mini Workstation is twice as powerful as any commercial mini PC on the market today", I won't hold my breath.
Getting better performance than "other mini PCs" is a pretty low bar for a stationary workstation. I'm unsure who this is for. It's not a laptop, so you can't bring it with you. A midtower would have better performance and can be strapped under your desk so you never see it.
[+] [-] djsumdog|9 years ago|reply
http://penguindreams.org/blog/building-a-thin-itx-router/
You wouldn't be able to build anything as powerful as these HP offerings, because they can custom fab parts to pack in ram and high end processors in a smaller density (like laptops) and build a lot of custom heat dispensations components as well.
Still, there are Thin-ITX boards that can support a decent amount of ram and power, just not Xeons or high end video cards.
[+] [-] AdamN|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revelation|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rodgerd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noja|9 years ago|reply
Edit: Liliputing says "There’s a 2.5 inch drive bay for a hard drive or SSD and an M.2 SATA SSD slot." (https://liliputing.com/2016/11/msi-trident-compact-vr-ready-...)
[+] [-] intrasight|9 years ago|reply
If it doesn't support ECC, there's no benefit vs the Intel Skull Canyon.
I am in the market for a new dev machine, and I want Xeon and ECC. Just not enough good options currently (unless you build from scratch).
[+] [-] djrogers|9 years ago|reply
It does support ECC - right there on the product page.
[+] [-] nextos|9 years ago|reply
It's a shame, because you can passively cool things like a i7-6700T these days without much effort and without ever falling into throttling [1]. Plus, Calyos is about to release a loop heat pipe that will be able to cool massive systems without any noise [2].
I wish someone like Apple or perhaps the new Microsoft had the vision to sell corporate desktops and workstations that did not suck noisewise. I imagine a little fanless Mac Mini running on Xeon would sell like hotcakes and would give Apple the chance to gain a further chunk of enterprise marketshare. But they don't seem to be interested.
[1] http://www.atlastsolutions.com/ultimate-fanless-mini-itx-pc-...
[2] http://www.calyos-tm.com/
[+] [-] rch|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digi_owl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mwfunk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joesmo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Merad|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] repsilat|9 years ago|reply
One upside is that this will fit in your carry-on luggage. Cheaper than a beefy laptop, but I'm not sure portability buys you much if you'd need to think about mouse/keyboard/monitor too.
Maybe people just want more physical room?
[+] [-] pavlov|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krylon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walshemj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mi100hael|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wscott|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gjem97|9 years ago|reply
EDIT: ah, I see it now. Three dual DisplayPorts: http://store.hp.com/us/en/ContentView?storeId=10151&catalogI...
[+] [-] honkhonkpants|9 years ago|reply
The question is really up to the GPU makers to put the right output capacity on their cards, and the integrator to hook up all the ports and make sure the software actually works.
[+] [-] manaskarekar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xlayn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rch|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdtsc|9 years ago|reply
Certainly like the performance of it.
[+] [-] andrewmcwatters|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] questionr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EdSharkey|9 years ago|reply
Any progress on that development?
[+] [-] dekhn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IanCal|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xCMP|9 years ago|reply
> The incredibly compact form factor resembles more a super computer from the future than a PC of today.
[+] [-] 24gttghh|9 years ago|reply
"HP Unveils its[1] First-Ever Mini Workstation"
It's certainly not an Industry first, nor a "World's First" as the press release claims.
[1]Based on publicly available information of workstation competitors as of October 3, 2016 with volume of at least 1 million units annually as of October 3, 2016 having < 3 litres volume, professional graphics, Intel® Xeon® quad core processor, ISV certified applications, ECC memory.