 Okay, we're back live at NAB, and I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com, SiliconANGLE.tv. And this is where all the action is happening in the media world. We're here to extract a signal from the noise. This is theCUBE, our flagship telecast. We go out to the events and extract a signal from the noise. And we're here at NAB, and I'm here with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and John, we're here with Dan Bennett. Dan, also known as the demo meister. He's inside this Intel Studio experience doing some demos. We're going to talk about that. And it's just an amazing scene here, isn't it, John? Yeah, you know, I was at the Sundance Film Festival a couple of years ago, and, you know, talking about workstations and computing power was, this is pre-Mac high-end Macs, and we're out there, and the workstations were very specialized. HP has a lot of workstations. They have a legacy in Unix. We all know the Mac is built on Unix, right? So these high-end workstations have been around. They're still here. What's the status of these? Because you need a lot of power. You totally do, yes. To use videos. So give us the update on what's going on with HP. You're doing a lot of demos here inside the booth. Tell us what you're showing, and what's the key features of the products. Sure. Well, we've got some new workstations that, in fact, we've just recently refreshed pretty much our entire line of workstations. Not quite all of them, but most of them are now refreshed. At the top of the line, we've got the Z820, which replaces our Z800. And the key new feature on that is that it supports Intel's latest desktop Xeons. That's the E5-2600 series. And that's amazing, because that gives you eight cores per CPU. And you can have two CPUs in the box giving you 16 cores. Then you turn on hyperthreading, which is another Intel technology. You've got 32 cores on the desktop. So people doing rendering, ray tracing, real-time reverbs. Doesn't have a good data center at your disposal. It's almost like a data center. But at the same time, you can't feed it as much current as you would to a server. It's got to be quiet. It's got to sit under someone's desk. But from an application standpoint that's doing a lot of things, you can really crank some performance. Absolutely can. You have a choice really as a user of whether you're doing multiple tasks at once, or whether you've got one task that needs all the horsepower it can get. So you've got all this I.O. coming out of these cores, going like crazy, and then it hits the wall of that spinning disk. What's happening there? What do you see is going on? So the Z820 is well-equipped because on the motherboard you have a RAID controller for SATA and a RAID controller for SAS. You can also get an additional RAID controller if you really want to go to town on striping disks together for performance. And we support SSDs from Intel, which we've found when you strike them together, the performance is just unbelievable. Very, very high performance. We have eSATA for connection to the outside world for people who might have red camera storage packs, for example. It's a great way of delivering content to the workstation. So do you see that? Obviously flash is coming in, price points are coming down. Do you see that as the future or will it be more of a mix? I think the mix will continue. I think we've seen SSDs taking off. To some extent, the SSD business was given a bit of a shot in the arm by the damage done in Thailand. The hard drive prices are going up, right? Well, that's beginning to come down again now. It's straightening out, but SSDs got a good run there, and I think a lot of people like them. The apps always drive the performance. When you look back at the PC business and workstations, mainly the PCs, that's where Mars Law was really in play for the couple decades before us. The apps drove that. New app came out, new features. What are the apps doing right now that are taking advantage of that core performance? That's a boatload of performance. Is it just video rendering? What kind of new things are you seeing that's putting pressure on the hardware? Well, ray tracing has always been a staple for as many CPU cores as you can provide, and so there are companies like DreamWorks, for example, who are integrating as much of their tool chain as they can into the parallel space so that an animator who previously would be working with grayscale models in an animated environment, he now gets to see real-time what somebody over in the other part of the building is doing with lighting and somebody else is doing with the mats and somebody else is doing with visual effects, and all these things integrate together in real-time on everybody's workstation so they get a much stronger picture of the artistic intent of the scene. At the same time, it's not just CPUs that are delivering power to the desktop. GPUs are also very powerful these days and can serve as generalized computers, and so for applications that can access the power of a GPU, they get very brisk acceleration. So the workflow really is impacted the most by this new tech, right? Sure. I mean, nobody likes watching a progress bar. Well, also, if people don't have to go back and wait and have meetings to get updates on what their softwares are doing, it's in real time as much as possible, right? I mean, we have customers in many spaces, not just the broadcasters and so on, but we talk to customers and give them more power and they will do more. They either... it takes less time to do the job, in which case they can do more iterations and end up with a better result, or they can throw more into their workload so they get a better quality result. So we heard from the show reel, Eric, from show reel about how much he loves the new gear, the new cameras, et cetera. What is the coolest thing you're seeing at NAB from a new toy, new app that's different this year in the floor that wasn't here last year, I haven't even talked about, but what's hitting the marketplace that's kind of new and cutting edge? Am I allowed to talk about an HP product in that space? Sure, yeah, absolutely, yeah. Because what I haven't mentioned yet is our Z1 workstation, which is the really new all-in-one workstation from HP that's creating a real buzz. We have some here in the Intel Studio experience. Imagine, say, a 27-inch all-in-one computer from a competitor. It's very nice, cool thing, but what we would call, there you go. I noticed the logo is on the back here. It's not what we would call a professional workstation. For a professional workstation, you want support for Xeon processors, ECC memory, support for professional graphics from, for example, NVIDIA. Our new Z1 has all that, but in addition to that, it's super easy to service. You can just kind of lay it flat, you push a couple of catches and open up the lid, and everything is there. And, well, let's put it this way. The reaction I most often get from people when I show them that begins with the word holy, so it's probably some divine workstation. So what's the price point of that workstation? Well, it starts at about $1,900, but quite frankly, there's room for expansion on top of that. So what's the ideal, if you're in the video editing and or production space, what, 3,000? More than that, more than that, more like five. Yeah, okay, so you've sort of touched on it. I want to ask, okay, so you've got all these standard components, you know, Xeon 8 core, videographics, et cetera, what is HP's value add? Is it the integration? Talk about that a little bit more. Well, the value add for this product is, because it's integrated all in one with a high-quality display, 27-inch display, that makes it great for use in the field, it makes it great for use in constrained environments. We think it'll be great in higher education. So for colleges that are teaching film school and animation and mechanical design, it's the perfect platform because you just put one per desk and it's a very easy thing to manage. Yeah, so the workstation business, you know, it's come a long way, you know. The center of workstation expertise at HP is where? It's in Fort Collins, North Colorado. That's right, based. All right, great. Yeah, we have R&D there, very strong R&D organization doing all the integration, all the mechanical design, mechanical design for the Z1, the Z820, Z620, done in Fort Collins. They're very, very clever guys. So Dave brought up the spinning disk problem. So real quick, I know we have like 30 seconds. Okay. In memory, you mentioned ECC, obviously it needs a lot of benefits, solid state, a lot of solid state memory in here in these devices. The Z820 can take, you're talking about RAM? Yeah. You can equip it without to half a terabyte of RAM, 512 megabytes. And then SSD as well. And then you could raid five, six SSDs together, and you have a really screaming machine. With no spinning disk. With no spinning disks. That's the way. We're going to say goodbye to the spinning disk. HP, thanks so much for coming on. Appreciate it. We'll be right back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, and thanks to Intel for underwriting our Cube to come here at the Intel Studio Experience live from NAB.