HP's New Z Line of Workstations

 

Experience with the Z product line

Last year we made the decision to license our rendering engine from Luxology and our users now have some of the best minds in computer graphics and visualization diligently working on proving them with one of the fastest rendering engines on the planet. The Luxology renderer provides us with a huge list of features that can readily compete with the best of the best. The Luxology renderer is fully multi-threaded and provides near linear speedups as more cores are brought into the mix. Dual core, twice the performance, quad core 4X and dual quad 8X... the picture is clear dual more with more cores.

We received the Z400 proto type workstation in mid January and were very impressed with the performance and the build quality of the machine.

After some testing we were pleasantly surprised to find that merely by enabling hyper-threading we were able to boost rendering performance by a whopping 20%. We were pretty skeptical of hyper threading working. Early attempts at hyper threading proved to be unusable, in that it adversely affected MicroStation's overall performance. It just seemed too good to be true, to be able to "get something for nothing"; however it seems Intel really did their homework designing the new Nehalem processor. The gains in performance with hyper threading are a substantial boost to rendering performance, so we are now recommending our users enable this feature.

We received the Z600 a few weeks after the Z400, and even though we were very impressed with the Z400, the Z600 is amazing. Luckily HP sent the Z400 first, with ample time to evaluate it prior to receiving the Z600, because once we had tasted the power of the Z600 we were pretty spoiled and hungry for more as the Z600's rendering performance was double that of the Z400.

The Z600 is the fastest workstation to date that we have ever tested.  However we have not had any hands on experience with the Z600's bigger brother the Z800, which we would expect to be equally fast at rendering and potentially faster at graphics manipulation as it supports the higher end graphic cards.

We especially liked the tool less design of the Z600, as you can remove just about anything at the flick of a lever, even the power supply. Absolutely amazing build quality, it is quiet and its bullet proof solid, with nice carrying handles built right into the case, making it easy to turn this workstation into a somewhat portable machine. Jerry Flynn, our resident visualization expert and product manager for the visualization team can found be lugging the Z600 home on weekends like a giant laptop "says he can't be without" for an entire weekend.

 

Rendering certainly is one of the more compute intensive aspects of MicroStation and stands to gain the most, but other areas such as fast hidden line, and dynamic views will benefit from the performance gains that the Z family brings to the user experience. We found that everything about the Z family was fast.  Booting and opening applications was noticeably faster than in previous generation machines.