When it was first unveiled yesterday at HP's Global Partner Conference in Las Vegas, NV, the company's new Workstation Z1 was touted as an engineering marvel, emphasized by the slogan, "power without the tower."

HP isn't shy in describing the Z1 as the "most compact workstation in the industry." They may very well be right, and as interesting as that is, who they intend to market it to is equally so. Workstations traverse enterprises and mid-sized and small businesses, but these have traditionally come as tower-based form factors, and at fairly high price points.

The Z1 traverses all of those things simultaneously. At a starting price of $1,955 in Canada for a base configuration, this is a high-powered machine that could be affordable for a business of just about any size.

HP executives and engineers on hand at the showcase in Las Vegas made it clear that the Z1's all-in-one (AIO) design was largely influenced by the popularity of consumer all-in-ones, though the paradigm between the two had to be vastly different. Consumer AIOs have no real option for upgrading or changing components inside, unless a repair was to be done by an authorized technician. That's a deal-breaker for any business, and a key reason why AIOs saw sluggish sales on the commercial side of the ledger.

What's particularly impressive about it is that almost every major component is serviceable. It supports Nvidia Quadro graphics cards, two hard drives (with 10,000 RPM) or solid state drives, a Blu-ray writer drive, a 400 watt power supply and up to four 8 GB memory chips. With the exception of the CPU, these other components can be swapped for replacements. HP also confirmed that there will be an aftermarket for these components directly from HP and from authorized resellers.

From an engineering perspective, the 27-inch screen has a resolution of 2550 x 1440 and displays a billion colours, rather than the typical 16 million. The best part is that the display can be folded down flat like it was a small table. This ostensibly allows for better viewing of a 3D image by more than one person, but it's also designed to make it easier to get to the guts inside. Once laid down flat, the screen's lid can be opened like it was a pizza box.

The base configuration uses an Intel Core i3 2120 processor, something common in consumer desktops and laptops. It's not until the Z1 uses the higher-end Intel Xeon processors that it truly hits a different level. But that, apparently, is part of the point.

Although HP executives specifically mentioned graphics and video shops, medical imaging and gaming developers as ideal candidates for the Z1, they also talked up the general scalability of the machine.

"It doesn't matter whether you're a one-man operation or you have thousands of employees, we designed the Z1 to do the job for anyone of them," said Jeff Wood, HP's VP of Marketing for the company's commercial business.

"We didn't aim for a specific price point because we've had businesses of all sizes use our previous workstations before," said Jim Zafarana, who heads HP's commercial business unit.

That may be true, but the underlying message of the whole event surrounding the Z1 is that you get what you pay for. Trying to run a creative-type of business on a sub-$1,000 PC might not be enough to scale the business up when better and more powerful tools are needed. This isn't to put words in any HP executive's mouth, since none of them actually said anything like that, but the inference is still fairly obvious. Try to multitask running Adobe's Creative Suite 5 and an Autodesk program, and it becomes clear that power and memory are crucial.

For all intents and purposes, the Z1 is not a consumer product, not in the slightest. But it's impressive for its scope and engineering, and it's the sort of PC that prosumers might be interested in, as well as anyone looking to run a business from a machine that is upgradeable.

The Z1 is coming to Canada in April, though no exact date has been set, nor have any distributor or channel partners been confirmed.

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