[Originally posted on 02/07/18]

The HP ZBook 14u and 15u G5 mobile workstations are the latest updates to the HP Z Workstation family, delivering remarkable performance in a thin and light design, allowing professionals to take their work on-the-go. Being a part of the HP Z Workstation family means that these ZBook Mobile Workstations are subjected to more vigorous and comprehensive testing, ensuring users get the best possible experience out of their system.

Equipped with the all new Radeon™ Pro WX 3100 card, the HP ZBook 14u and 15u G5 provide workstation-grade graphics performance, features, and stability for the professional applications most important to you. Many of today’s popular design and manufacturing applications such as Autodesk® Revit®, Siemens® NX® and Dassault Systèmes® SOLIDWORKS® are being certified on these powerful mobile workstations powered by the Radeon™ Pro WX 3100, bringing you peace of mind that your application is going to work the way it’s intended to. With the optional 4K display available on both mobile workstations, you will be able to experience breathtaking visuals and details within your favorite applications – and you don’t have to be tied to a single location in order to do so. With more and more companies expecting their staff to be on site at a building project, next to the race track or simply in your favorite coffee shop, there has never been a better time to explore the flexibility and performance offered from a mobile workstation.

With Radeon Pro graphics, you can unlock features such as Order Independent Transparency (OIT), found in design applications like PTC® Creo® and Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS or the hardware acceleration offered by applications like Autodesk Revit. OIT provides a “pixel-accurate” representation of the model and its surrounding geometry. This creates a more practical, transparent 3D viewpoint for designers to continuously work within, helping improve the designers’ sense of “design intuition” and assisting in better decision-making through the product development stages.

Another feature that gets accelerated by Radeon Pro graphics on some of today’s leading design and manufacturing software is ‘occlusion culling’. AMD has worked closely with application vendors to develop and accelerate this feature on GPUs. Applications that support this feature, such as Autodesk® Revit®, only draw elements that are visible and not those out of view. When the “Draw Visible Elements Only” option is enabled within Revit, users that are manipulating the viewports by orbiting, panning or zooming can see better performance compared with a standard setup where it is disabled. Importantly, the calculations that control this occlusion culling are performed on the GPU rather than the CPU, allowing more powerful GPUs to deliver outstanding 3D performance for the Revit user.

While discussing Revit we know that many users will often split their project files into multiple Revit sessions. With the latest HP ZBook 14u and 15u G5, users can now run much larger projects without worrying about graphics card and system performance. These new HP G5 Mobile Workstations are certainly punching above their predecessors and we understand that it’s not all about the GPU, and are pleased to see this system offering users 32GB of RAM for the complex Revit projects.

During our initial tests with key customers we saw that even complex Revit 2018 projects would open lightning fast, and in some project cases mobile workstations would no longer have noticeable redraws of the files. The project was a substantial file of just over 900MB, much more than a typical users’ scene of 300 to 400MB. However, if you think about your own workflow with your preferred design application, it’s unlikely you will run it without any other package open. In the above example, we ensured our test scenarios matched your real-world setup, with a test session involving multiple industry standard applications open during the one session, including AutoCAD, PDFs and emails. All are surprisingly taxing when used in conjunction on a system. (Although we didn’t spill any coffee on it, which always seems to happen when were out using our mobile workstations.)

These new ultra-portable mobile workstations are tested for altitude, shock, drops, explosive atmospheres, extreme temperatures, sand, humidity and more1. Work confidently anywhere you go, from inside an airplane or local café, to an outdoor jobsite. It is surprising to see just how far mobile workstations have come and they are no longer just for Excel or PowerPoint users. You can now have confidence that a mobile workstation will perform strongly with your favorite 3D intensive design tools. The HP ZBook Mobile Workstations with Radeon Pro graphics are designed to handle the toughest workloads, wherever you may roam.

For more information on the new HP ZBook 14u and ZBook 15u, visit www.hp.com/go/zbook14u and www.hp.com/go/zbook15u

Warren Eng is a Product Marketing Manager for professional graphics at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied. GD-5

FOOTNOTES

1. MIL-STD-810G testing is not intended to demonstrate fitness of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) contract requirements or for military use. Test results are not a guarantee of future performance under these test conditions. Accidental damage requires an optional HP Accidental Damage Protection Care Pack.