"During your whole week at AU," said Autodesk CEO Carl Bass, delivering the keynote at this year's Autodesk University, "look around for all the disruptions and all the opportunities that are happening in your industry."

We didn't have to look far. In the AU Exhibition Hall next door, a buzz around Hewlett-Packard's pavilion was drawing a crowd. HP had just debuted a rather wicked-looking piece of Mac-busting hardware, their Z2 Mini G3 workstation, aimed at architects, designers, engineers and other CAD users:

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In person, it is ridiculously sexy—which is a bit ironic, as the tiny-but-powerful machine is meant to be hidden away. In one configuration, the HP guys had it clinging to the back of a monitor stand, totally invisible to the user.

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In another configuration, an HP rep had it sitting flat on a work surface, and you could really appreciate how small it was—roughly 8.5 inches square, and just 2.3 inches tall.

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Even more impressively, the rep had this machine—the base model—hooked up and driving six displays at once, including one running AutoCAD and another playing video. He popped the machine's top off (it's designed to be easily removed without tools) and let us hear the sound of…nothing. The cooling fans were spinning nearly silently. "It's designed to bring airflow in from the front and blow it out of the back in a very efficient way," he said. "You can see that the fans aren't even spinning that fast." (Both the Intel CPU and the Nvidia GPU each have their own fan.)

While it may look like it was designed by a Cylon, the Z2 Mini is form-follows-function as much as it is style. The corner bump-outs protruding beyond the ventilation grills are in case you're using it on a crowded desktop. Even if you've got stacks of papers or other stuff butted right up against the machine, "It's impossible to block the cooling vents," he explained.

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I even love how HP has updated their logo on the side.

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The company reckons the machine is 90% smaller than your average desktop, yet "twice as powerful as any commercial mini PC on the market today."

The HP Z2 Mini was designed for the millions of CAD users demanding smaller hardware without compromising acoustics and performance and mission-critical reliability.

The workstation, running Windows 10 Pro or Linux, comes equipped with next generation Intel® Xeon® processors5, NVIDIA® professional graphics and the availability of HP Z Turbo Drive for handling large files remarkably fast.

The HP Z2 Mini design and engineering ingenuity will transform the way people think about workstations and workspaces.

The machine, which starts at $699, will be available in December.

I'm pleased to see that companies like Microsoft and HP are stepping up to fill the design void left by Apple's relative negligence towards creative power users. Between the Z2 Mini and the Surface Studio Pro, it seems the future of our workstations will become more exciting, design-wise, without us having to wait for Cupertino.