What Puts the Fury in HP's New Z8 Fury Workstation?

What makes HP's new Z8 Fury Workstation so (fast and) furious? In this exclusive interview from the HP booth at NAB 2023, HP Global Segment Lead, Media & Entertainment, Barbara Marshall, gives Streaming Media's Marc Franklin the low-down on the new HP Fury G5 Tower, which, according to HP's website, features "transformative single socket technology" that "delivers extreme performance with up to 56 cores in a single CPU, to also unleash the power of up to 4 high-end GPUs."

Sapphire Rapids and 56 Cores

"What makes the Fury more furious than say, a regular Z8?" Franklin asks.

"Good question," replies Marshall. "The reason we've got this new range of workstations is because of the new Intel Sapphire Rapids CPU architecture. We've been waiting for that for a few years. It's the first time in six or seven years that they brought out their next generation of scalable CPUs. It's a step up from the normal Z8. We've had a Z8 for many years, but with the new Intel architecture, we can get a single CPU in the machine, which has 56 cores on it. That frees up the space to be able to add four double-wide GPUs."

"So, do you no longer need the option of two CPUs?" Franklin asks. "One is all you need and you just choose number of cores?"

"Absolutely," Marshall says, "although for insurance purposes, we are still offering a two-GPU Z8, that's the Z8 without the Fury. Just in case there are people who, for whatever reasons, feel they still need the two CPUs. And with those, it's 32 cores on each, so you can go to 64 cores in that machine. The 56-core CPU goes up to 4.8 Gigahertz Turbo."

CPUs, GPUs, VFX, and NLE

"Wow," remarks Franklin. "How important is the CPU once you've got all these GPUs in there when it comes to video editing and rendering and all that stuff?"

"This is a really good example of a balanced machine," Marshall says. "And as you're implying, a lot of software, which was traditionally CPU, has added capability to be GPU-accelerated. So you still need the CPU, but a lot of tasks can now be moved onto the GPU. So it kind of depends on the software," she continues. "We see a lot of different use cases on this machine. If you take Autodesk Flame and visual effects and compositing, then traditionally that's been a Z8 kind of a software. It scales to two GPUs and needs a mid-range CPU or 16 to 20 core on the CPU. So you need power on both. SideFX Houdini, which was used to create the scene in our launch video--the desert scene that was rendered as the machine dropped out of the airplane and it had to render in 30 seconds to save the Z Fury--has a new renderer, which is in beta. I think it will be released properly at the end of the year. That scales to four GPUs, or as many GPS as you can throw at it. So therefore, again, you're taking advantage of the CPU cores that you need to run Houdini, but then you can take advantage of multiple GPUs as well.

"You mentioned video editing," she continues. "Video playback is gonna benefit from the software that has used GPU acceleration for video playback. So it really is quite a lot of different use cases. Obviously, we've got a range of workstations. So with the new Intel architecture, we've got the new Z4, we've got the new Z6, the Z8 dual CPU, and then the Z8 Fury. So all of those can do 4K for sure. As you start getting into higher resolution and your datasets get bigger and bigger, that's when you start needing more memory, more storage, more power. So that's where you will start going off the stack."

The Fury Under the Hood

"Barbara has magically rendered into Quincy," quips Franklin, "who is gonna show us a little bit about the inside of the Z8 Fury. So what do we have here? "

"We have a lot of GPUs," says Quincy Ojih, Workstations Tech Marketing Engineer at HP. "This is the Z8 Fury G5. We have a 56-core machine that can hold up to four RTX A6000s from NVIDIA or the new RTX 6000 Ada cards as well. It's a very capable machine up to, I believe, 2 TB of memory. And as you can see if you open this cover exposure, all the memory DIMM slots here, and then up at the top you can see that there are two of what we call Personality modules that can hold two NVMe drives each. So you have four NVMe storage storage options available. You can also add in a card here that can have hot-swappable drives as well. So all the storage that you need is in the Z8 Fury."

"What's the largest size now for the NVMe drives that you could put in the Fury?" Franklin asks.

"Currently you can hold up to four terabytes each," Ojih explains. "And then you could also hold these three 3.5 hard disk drives as well. So like I said, plenty of storage options maxed out. This thing can go around $40,000 just depending on how you configure it."

Who's Got the Fury?

"Barbara is back," Franklin says, "to talk about who's actually using some of HP's workstations now. Are the big studios using them?"

"Of course, many of the big studios are," says Marshall, "but I probably shouldn't name names. For visual effects, post-production broadcast in particular, I can call out The Mill because we worked with them on our stunt video. And so in the stunt video, Tim Kafka, who is head of CG LA for The Mill and now Head of creative Operations, created a desert scene sort of mimicking the Anza-Borrego, which is where we were filming the stunt. And he created this scene in Houdini. It needed to render in 30 seconds in order for the V8 Fury to save itself. And so that's an example of the kind of work that can be done."

"I've used a number of Z workstations in the past and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on this one. I've got some that are over a decade old and they're still going. I still find useful work for them to do," reports Franklin.

"You are the fifth person today that's told me that they've got an over 10-year old Z Workstation."

"I've got a Z800 and a Z820 still running," says Franklin. "The Z800 is doing capturing for my archival company, capturing old video tapes and such. And the Z820 is an edit system that edits HD and 4K, and that's gotta be 10 or 12 years old."

"Built to last," says Marshall.

"Can't wait to see what we can do with something like this," says Franklin. "I'll have toget one of those 12K cameras and put it through its tests."