All the news about semiconductors may be about NVIDIA, but it should be known that AMD, NVIDIA’s leading competitor, is not standing still. They are on the show floor at 3DXW25, the annual SolidWorks Conference, in at least two booths: their own and HP’s.
At HP, we see a giant tractor-trailer, an assembly of thousands of parts, being twirled around. That glitch-free display might be expected on a workstation packed with GPUs – but this is happening on a thin, light laptop, the 14-inch HP ZBook. Is there a cloud connection and GPUs behind the curtain? Nope. All the computing is being done locally.
That amount of graphic processing being done could be overheating the CPU, GPU or whatever in in that little laptop. Yet the Z-book shows no sign of smoke and is cool to touch. In fact, the Z-book is hardly straining. We hear it can go on like this for 14 hours on a charge, though it’s hard to believe that it would last that long with a graphically intense SW session.
It’s all being done with AMD’s latest SOC, or system on a chip, the AMD Ryzen Pro, a marvel of technology on the head of a pin. Okay, it may be on a big thumbtack. HP would not let us pry open the laptop to see the chip.
As Apple did with the M series SOCs, the Ryzen combines CPU, GPU and NPU (neural processing unit) functionality all on one chip. This way, no data has to travel on buses, which is faster and generates less heat.
We also wondered about the cooling channels, and it was explained to us that the cooling was done with two fans. Underneath, about half of the ZBook’s bottom is perforated with holes. Slits along the back is where heat is exhausted. The fans could not be heard over the ambient noise on the show floor.
The Ryzen works by allocating up to 96GB of video RAM.
To get this much horsepower would take $10,000, we hear – and not fit in the laptop’s form factor.
Prefer to work in the office? HP has downsized the workstation for you. It now fits in a small black rectangular cube that can be mounted anywhere, even hidden under the desk or hung off the back of a monitor. We’ve seen tiny workstations before, but the G1a is the first to include the power supply, which is normally an ungainly brick kept hidden behind the curtain at a demo.