By Kingsley I. Ilechukwu, Correspondent Lagos

Bringing new levels of power previously only available in high-end desktop workstations, at NVIDIA’s GTC 2021, HP is announcing significant GPU performance improvements to its entry Z by HP desktop lineup, including HP Z1 Tower G8, HP Z2 Small Form Factor G8, and Z2 Tower G8, to ensure today’s professionals have the right technology and tools to be productive, connected, collaborative, and secure, whether working from home or in the office. Additionally, in order to democratise 3D for entry workflows and bring advanced visualisation to the masses, Z offers the latest technology from NVIDIA® and Samsung, brands trusted by the creative community to bring reliability.

Performance is critical for creators to speed up the conversion of ideas into designs and their needs continue to grow with real time engines as design cycle times are reduced.  As companies migrate to a more hybrid work model, 77 per cent of IT decision makers agree that this means an increase in security vulnerabilities. The Z entry desktop lineup offers advanced security features, equipping IT departments the ability to keep devices, data, and identities protected.

NVIDIA’s new NVIDIA® RTX™ A4000 and RTX™ A5000 provide HP Z2 Tower G8 customers the option to configure their Z desktop with the latest generation RT cores, Tensor Cores, and CUDA cores to deliver a powerful desktop experience for designers, engineers, and artists to create the future, without limits. Z by HP is also adding additional Ampere graphics options to the performance desktop line, including the Z4, Z6, and Z8 desktop workstations, for improved performance across segment workflows.

“Remote work is going to continue and employees will have a choice of where to work,” said vice president of Professional Visualization at NVIDIA, Bob Pette,. “The new NVIDIA Ampere architecture GPUs with Z by HP desktops will give employees the computing power they need to work from anywhere.”

To further enhance the performance of the Z entry desktop lineup, customers can now configure the Z1 Tower, Z2 SFF, and Z2 Tower with Samsung’s recently announced PCIe Gen4 drives. The latest drives from Samsung offer increased transfer rates, delivering improved bandwidth for even greater performance and seamless workflows for data-intensive users. Customers now get unthrottled storage performance because of innovative thermal solutions designed by Z by HP engineers.

“Today’s rapidly changing work environment has cemented the PC’s role as a critical productivity tool,” said Corporate Senior Vice President of Memory Marketing, Samsung, Jaejune Kim. “With applications growing in complexity and file sizes increasing exponentially, PCIe Gen4 SSDs offer a big step up in performance.  We’re proud to partner with HP on the design in of our PM9A1 SSD into HP’s newest performance platforms to maximise the technology benefits for an improved user experience.”

The Z2 Small Form Factor, the world’s fastest SFF workstation running Autodesk and SolidWorks applications, and the Z2 Tower improves on previous generations with the latest components from NVIDIA®, Intel®, and Samsung, and continues to be an industry-leader in sustainability being part of the world’s most sustainable PC portfolio. To help meet needs of the today’s workforce, the Z2 SFF and Z2 Tower continue to offer increased expandability capabilities with tool-less access in condense and compact desktop footprints.

The Z2 Small Form Factor features up to 11th generation Intel® Core® and Xeon® W processors and up to an NVIDIA® Quadro RTX™ 3000 GPU to deliver outstanding performance for accelerated ray tracing and AI in a small size with endless options to upgrade. The Z2 Tower is the benchmark in entry-level workstation power for professional creators. With the Z2 Tower, users can now run multi-threaded applications while multitasking by leveraging up to an NVIDIA® RTX™ A5000 GPU and Intel® Xeon® vPro® processors and Intel CPU K-series performance with no throttling in SPECapc™ for SOLIDWORKS™ 2021 benchmark in a design engineered to evolve.

The Z2 G8 SFF and Z2 G8 Tower also feature unthrottled performance (Z’s industry-leading thermals keep the processor and graphics card cool) so they can run at max performance for extended periods of time.

The Z1 G8 is HP’s most affordable pro-certified Z desktop, built to handle design editing, and even gaming. Now offering the latest pro-grade performance with up to an NVIDIA® Quadro™ P2200, this SolidWorks® and AutoCAD®-certified desktop is perfect for 2D/3D design and drafting workflows. Additionally, users can choose to configure the Z1 G8 with NVIDIA® GeForce® graphics up to an RTX™ 3070 for VR and software development work. For powerful performance on complex multithreaded threaded applications, the Z1 G8 offers the latest Intel® Core™ vPro® processors.

HP Z1 Tower G8, HP Z2 Small Form Factor G8 and the HP Z2 Tower G8 are expected to be available in Nigeria from May this year.

Note to Editor: It is important to note that HP and Hewlett-Packard separated in 2015 and are no longer one and the same company.