The Hewlett Packard Company has been working in the hardware market for many years. It is one of the oldest companies, producing computers. The company is going forward with the advanced technologies. In this way, the HP blade servers and home computers are coming all over the world. Let us make a review of the HP new achievements.
A multimedia desktop HP system is an embodiment of Media Center conceit. With the Windows XP Media Center operation system, this hardware performs an efficient usage of multimedia abilities. In addition to performing the traditional tasks, this home computer can be used as a TV, a DVD player, a home video studio and a musical system. The cheapest one of these PCs costs about one hundred US dollars without a monitor. This configuration includes a processor Pentium 4 with a 2.4 Hhz CPU clock, a RAM 512 MB, a 80 GB hard disk and a video card NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440. Tools for input, output and communications are a multi-media keyboard, a remote-control station, a TV-tuner, six USB ports, two or more FireWire ports, a local network controller and a modem V.90. The most powerful computer from these series is the m280, based on Pentium 4.3 Hhz with a Hyper-Threading support. This giant has a 512 MB RAM, a 200 GB hard disk, DVD+RW/CD-RW and DVD-ROM drives, an NVIDIA GeForceFX 5600 video card and a sound system Klipsch Promedia 5.1. The cost of this computer is twice higher.
The HP blade servers are very popular due to their design and extraordinary technical parameters. However, the home computers do not stand aside from them. The Presario 8000X is a very interesting solution of the company. HP produces this system under a new trade mark of the company, Compaq X.; as a matter of fact, they have created the trade mark to produce gaming systems, based on the Intel Pentium 4 processors, however, the Athlon 64 chips also can be used in this line. Thus, the model Presario 8000Z has a processor Athlon 64 3200+, a 256 MB RAM PC3200, a 80 GB hard disk and a video system on the base of ATI Radeon 9200 chip with a 128 MB RAM. HP provides acoustic systems and a pre-installed Windows XP Home Edition for the system.
HP proposes an ultra thin blade servers family, Consolidated Client Infrastructure (CCI), for the corporative environments. This solution combines thin client devices with the PC computers that are rack mounted like the HP blade servers. Each PC contains one chip and is supposed to work with one user. The clients use the Transmeta processor and the built-in Windows XP version. This approach allows to decrease wastes for support and administration of the PC for more than seventy percent. At the same time, these analogues of the HP blade servers prevent a loose of data due to a possible hard disk failure.
The CCI differs from the network computers technology, popular some years ago, by an ability to use standard software and peripherals for the PC.
The Blade PCs and blade servers are the representatives of a new computers' generation. Decreasing of the geometrical parameters without any looses in performance and other technical characteristics is a step forward in the development of information technologies.