System Architecture - HP Z440 Technical White Paper

Technical white paper | HP Z440 Workstation
Quiet and reliable
Acoustic performance is essential to HP and our customers because a noisy environment increases user fatigue and
reduces productivity. HP has extended its leadership in this area with the new HP Z440. With the additional performance
and capabilities, one might expect the HP Z440 to be louder than its predecessor. However, through innovations in
engineering, the HP Z440 Workstation performs significantly quieter than the HP Z420. Fans are strategically placed to
provide optimum system cooling, and by using advanced algorithms to control fan speeds based on system configuration
and key component temperatures the HP Z440 delivers an extremely quiet and reliable system.
While low acoustics, thermal management, expandability, and performance are all high priorities—it is essential that
the system reliably withstands extreme conditions and workloads. Rigorous climatic and dynamic testing help ensure
that HP Workstations are highly reliable in a wide variety of demanding conditions, while delivering uncompromising
performance.
Designed with the environment in mind
HP is committed to environmental sustainability and energy efficiency. To reduce energy consumption, HP Workstations
offer ENERGY STAR® qualified configurations with the choice of a 90% efficient 700 W power supply or 85% efficient
525 W power supply. The HP Workstation design team has taken a proactive approach (beyond industry regulations) to
recyclability and selecting materials that reduce the risk to the environment. HP Z440 configurations are available with
low-halogen flame retardant materials.
1

System architecture

The HP Z440 is the successor to the HP Z420 personal workstation. Its
architecture introduces several new functionalities and technologies. These
include DDR4 memory architecture, Intel®-integrated USB 3.0, I/O slot
improvements and better performance.
New Technologies
New Intel® Processor micro-architecture
The HP Z440 Workstation uses the Intel® C612 chipset to support the latest up to eight-core Intel® Xeon® E5-1600 and
E5-2600 processor series (Haswell, 22 nm), including processors of up to 140W. Intel® Haswell processors feature a
new micro-architecture and a new instruction set including AVX2 (Advanced Vector Extensions 2.0) and FMA (Floating-
point fused Multiply Add instructions) that help deliver faster compute performance, with low energy consumption. The
integrated 4-channel DDR4 memory controller helps to increase peak data transfer and bandwidth over the HP Z420.
Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 2.0 (Intel® AVX2)
The new Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 2.0 (Intel® AVX2) extends the Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions (Intel® AVX)
with 256-bit integer instructions, floating-point fused multiply add (FMA) instructions, and gather operations. The 256-
bit integer vectors benefit math, codec, image, and digital signal processing software. FMA can improve performance
in face detection, professional imaging, and high performance computing. Gather operations increase vectorization
opportunities for many applications. In addition to the vector extensions, this generation of Intel® processors adds new
bit manipulation instructions useful in compression, encryption, and general purpose software.
Intel® Data Protection Technology with AES-NI (Intel® AES-NI)
The Intel® Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (Intel® AES-NI) are a set of Single Instruction Multiple Data
(SIMD) instructions that enable fast and secure data encryption and decryption based on the Advanced Encryption
Standard (AES). Intel® AES-NI is valuable for a wide range of cryptographic applications, such as applications that perform
bulk encryption/decryption, authentication, random number generation, and authenticated encryption. AES is broadly
accepted as the standard for both government and industry applications, and is widely deployed in various protocols.
3